The Early Investigations of Joanne Kilbourn (14 page)

“The ‘house’ – Ray tossed that word off so casually, but it was wholly inadequate. I was thirty years old but I had never been in a rich man’s house – God, Jo, that house made you see why people get the hots for money.”

I smiled. Howard had, since I’d known him, lived well, but he always talked as if he had to return his pop bottles to pay for his next meal.

Howard caught my smile and grinned. “I know, I know, Jo, but you should have seen the Lorscott place – another order of things altogether. The house was a beauty – clapboard, I guess, and painted a shade of grey that looked sometimes grey and sometimes – what’s that shade of light purple?”

“Lavender?”

“Yeah, lavender. And lilacs. The lilacs were everywhere – great masses of them all around the house – white and purply pink and …” He smiled. “Lavender. Gentle – a gentle
house for gentle people, but a week before in this gentle house, the twenty-five-year-old daughter had tried to hack her old man’s head and nuts off with an ax and, when Mum tried to stop her, had chopped off Mum’s fingers.”

“Oh, God, Howard, no.”

“We rang the bell and, as we were standing there in the sunshine waiting, Ray Lewis said something I’ve repeated to myself a thousand times. ‘Don’t let the splendour get to you, kid; when they’re scared, they dirty their drawers just like the rest of us.’ Words to live by, I guess, but when I stepped into that front hallway, it was hard to believe anybody ever dirtied anything around there. Marty and I had just bought our first house – it was about three blocks from Mieka’s new place, close to the Catholic school, of course, for Marty. Anyway, we were fixing it up and we thought it was really special, but next to the Lorscott place it was pathetic – a real dump.

“The housekeeper walked us down a hall as long as a bowling alley. The walls on both sides were hung with discreet pictures of the family – the ancestral line, I guess. I was feeling more and more like the dumb bohunk from the sticks, when I saw yellow police tape blocking off the entrance to a room with a big desk and a globe and a lot of books – the old man’s office – the scene, as we say, of the crime. But the housekeeper just marched us right on by and at the end of the hall, she opened a door and we were in the sunroom – the atrium, she called it. In the centre of the room was a bunch of wicker furniture, some chairs with flowery cushions and a round table. Sitting there waiting, as sweet as a little girl at a birthday party, was Eve.

“And here,” he said, “is our dinner. Do I get to pick the restaurant from now on?”

“Till the day we die,” I said. “That is a beautiful piece of meat.”

The Chateaubriand was nicely charred on the outside, pink inside and covered in a good béarnaise sauce made with fresh tarragon. The waiter sliced the beef and arranged it and our vegetables well and without fuss on oval pewter plates.

“You know, whatever you want to say about Eve, and over the years we’ve all said plenty, she is a beauty. That day she was beautiful enough to stop your heart. She must have been about twenty, and her hair was still black. It didn’t turn grey until after the car accident. She wore it kind of fluffed out the way women did in 1963. The housekeeper – Mrs. Cartwright – God, Jo, half the time I can’t remember where I parked the car, but I can remember the name of a housekeeper I met for maybe three minutes more than twenty-five years ago. Anyway, Mrs. Cartwright brought us our scones and tea, and everything was very civilized. Eve was cool as a cucumber, pouring the tea, passing the butter, all that stuff, and she told us the history of the house and then, in that same flat little voice, she told us what happened that night.”

“How did she deal with it?”

“She made one hell of a witness – every detail, no stumbling, no hysteria. She even put in all the disclaimers, ‘and then I believe my sister said,’ and, ‘then, to the best of my recollection, my father moved rapidly toward the window.’ Anyway, she told her little story, and it wasn’t very nice. Her sister alleged, to use Eve’s word, that the old man had made improper advances to her – Eve’s words again – from the time she was a little kid and now she couldn’t hold her head up and then, so help me, Jo, Eve kind of giggled the way you do when you’re getting near the punch line, and said, ‘My sister said if she couldn’t hold her head up, my father shouldn’t be allowed to, either, so she took this axe and started whacking at his head and his private parts.’ Then she laughed, and I swear, Jo, she was surprised when we didn’t join in.

“Anyway, apparently when the mother tried to stop Sister Nancy, Sister Nancy chopped her through the fingers.”

I swallowed the rest of my wine and filled our glasses. “And Eve saw it all?”

Howard was grim. “And Eve saw it all, but here’s the kicker, Jo. She wouldn’t let us use any of it. She said, ‘Now you know the truth, and that should help you arrange’ – that was her word, ‘arrange’ – ‘what they tell you. But what you’ve heard here must not go out of this room,’ and she walked out and left us sitting there, the hired help smelling the pretty flowers.”

Howard speared the last of his steak, and the waiter came to remove our plates. Howard asked him to bring us both coffee and B&B, and sat back contentedly.

I was on the edge of my seat. “Well, what happened?”

“Not much. Ray and I tried every tack we could think of, but Eve wouldn’t testify. Mum and Pop and Sister Nancy lied through their teeth – said it was an accident, some sort of aberration. Little Nancy had always been delicate, blah, blah, blah, so that was that. Nancy went to a toney sanitarium in upper New York State – the kind of place where you can stash your resident psycho if you’ve got the money. The Americans are better at understanding that kind of thing than we are. And Mum and Pop went back to the house at the lake and lived happily ever after. Every so often I still see Old Man Lorscott’s picture in the
Globe
– appointed to the board of this or that.” He shook his head, then looked up. “Jo, do you want to split a piece of cheesecake? They make one with Amaretto here that you would really love.”

I groaned. “Howard, if we have cheesecake, that will push the number of calories for this meal into six figures.”

“Jo, forget the calories tonight. Yes or no?”

“Yes – now tell me, how did Eve get here?”

“She just came. After the trial I got a cheque signed by Eve
Lorscott. If I hadn’t needed the money so much for the new house, I would have framed it, but it was a generous cheque and Marty wanted to fence in the backyard. Anyway, I’d see Ray Lewis at bar association meetings, and the first few times I saw him we’d talk about the Lorscotts and then, you know how it is, we both had other stories. Anyway, the Lorscotts kind of drifted to the back of my mind.

“Then one day, about five years later – I think it must have been 1968, or one of those years when the world was blowing up, I was walking across the university campus. There was a demonstration against the war in Vietnam, and there, marching along together, were Eve Lorscott and Andy Boychuk. They were a striking couple. Andy looked pretty much the way he did when you knew him – longer hair, of course. Eve in 1968 was very different from the woman we know now. Remember how the kids then used to talk about being free? Well, that day Eve was free. She wasn’t the wound-up little doll Ray Lewis and I had met in Port Durham, and she wasn’t the fragile woman you and I know. She was free and she was very beautiful.

“Andy was in my criminal law class. He waved, came over and introduced Eve. You know, Eve always surprises. I was prepared to play dumb and ignore the connection, but Eve – cool as you please – slipped her hand into mine and said, ‘Howard and I have met. In fact, he’s the reason I’m here. After all that trouble with Nancy, I needed a place to escape to – and I was sitting there one day, and Saskatchewan just came to mind. I mean whoever would pursue anybody here?’ And she beamed and put her arm around Andy’s waist and lay her head on his shoulder. They were such a striking couple. Then they got married, and you know the rest. That awful accident …” He picked up the little lamp that had a candle burning inside it. “As I said, Eve Boychuk has had one hell of a life.”

“I wonder how she survived,” I said.

“That’s a question for a shrink or a philosopher, Jo. I’m just a washed-up politician; I don’t have answers for questions like that.”

I reached across the table and squeezed his hand. “Not so washed-up,” I said.

The Amaretto cheesecake was as heavenly as Howard promised it would be, but he was subdued as we ate it. When we finished, he leaned across the table and looked at me hard.

“Jo, I guess everyone at that picnic is a suspect. Did you have any special reason for asking about Eve?”

“No – at least no more reason to ask about her than about any of us. And don’t forget, there were five thousand people there. I know the police have got the big push on, and I keep hoping I’m going to turn on the radio and hear they’ve arrested some poor crazy person who killed Andy because he got out of the wrong side of the bed that morning or because God told him to. But we have to face facts. It’s been eleven days now, and the police are still coming up empty. What if it’s not some anonymous psycho? What if it’s somebody we know? What if it’s one of us?”

Howard tossed back the last of his drink. “I don’t know, Jo. Do you remember that
TV
show that used to open with the police sergeant saying, ‘Be careful out there’? I guess that’s all you can do. Be careful.”

Mieka, perfect Mieka, had unpacked my suitcase and hung up my skirt and blouse for the next day. She had even thrown my nightgown and robe on the bed.

“Where’s the chocolate on my pillow?” I asked.

“You don’t deserve one. I’ll bet you and Howard ate and drank everything that wasn’t nailed down. Where is he, by the way? I thought he might come in for tea.”

“Not tonight, little girl. He was a bit tired and I have to get up early tomorrow because I’m going out to see Roma Boychuk.”

“Andy’s mother?” Mieka said. “Well, don’t give her a clear shot at you.”

“Mieka, what an awful thing to say. And you don’t even know her.”

“Oh, but I do. One night I’d had it up to here with you nagging at me about my grades, and I complained to Andy. You know what a nice guy he was. Anyway, that night we had a long talk about mothers.”

I was surprised. “When was that?”

“After midterms when I was in grade eleven. Remember when you told me I’d end up scrubbing toilets at the bus station if I didn’t pass chemistry?”

“Well, you did pass chemistry.”

“With a fifty-three. Anyway, Andy took your side, of course. Said you guys do nag at us because you love us so much. But in the process of defending mothers collectively, he said some pretty interesting things about his own mother.”

“Such as?”

“Such as nothing. It’s bedtime. You’ll be seeing Andy’s mother tomorrow. Howard would say I was prejudicing the witness. But you should know” – and she grinned and bent to kiss me good night – “that there are some mothers who devour their young.”

Roma Boychuk still lived in the Junction, on the west side of town, in the house Andy grew up in. The west side is where you go if you want used furniture or real Szechuan or twenty minutes of romance. Farther out, toward the railway station, is the area called the Junction. It’s a neighbourhood of onion-domed churches and mom-and-pop grocery stores with names like Molynka’s or Federko’s. The Junction was, Andy said, a great neighbourhood to grow up in. As I walked along the quiet streets where the leaves on the elm trees were already turning yellow, I tried to imagine Andy running along these sidewalks to school, and I tried to remember what I knew about Roma Boychuk.

It wasn’t much. Andy had been born when his mother was forty. His father died just before or just after Andy’s birth. I don’t remember Andy ever speaking of him. Roma doted on her son. I once handed Andy an article about the disproportionately large number of political leaders who were the favoured children of strong, domineering mothers. I had expected him to laugh, but he hadn’t.

“They think they’re doing you a favour, you know – all that love. But you spend your whole life trying to keep the love coming. That’s why so many politicians are so screwed up – and Jo, the demands …” His sentence had trailed off.

The fear of his mother’s disapproval was something everybody who worked for Andy had to deal with. He always spoke Ukrainian to his mother, and when our party announced a policy that was at odds with his mother’s beliefs, Andy would be on the phone with her for hours. I didn’t need to understand Ukrainian to know he was explaining, rationalizing, justifying. He would come from these phone calls shamefaced and telling a joke on himself, but he never stopped calling. Once somebody, I think it was Dave Micklejohn, had come back from Saskatoon raving about how generously Roma had welcomed him into her home. Andy had laughed and said, “Just don’t cross her or they’ll find you at the bottom of the South Saskatchewan with a crochet hook driven through your heart.”

I had the address in my notebook, and Howard had given me directions. I didn’t need them. I knew the house at once because I recognized the place next door – the home of the Sawchuks, Roma’s archenemies. The families had lived next door to one another for sixty years, and they had fought for sixty years.

“Why doesn’t somebody move?” I’d asked Andy once.

“And lose their reason for living?” Andy had shrugged. “Jo, if my mother gets a new brooch or if I get my picture in the paper, her pleasure isn’t complete until Mrs. Sawchuk – ‘that Sawchuk’ as my mother calls them all – sees it, and I’ll bet it’s the same for them. Anyway, the Sawchuks have their revenge. You should see their house.”

In truth, the Sawchuks’ house was unremarkable except for the colour: a neat, rectangular wooden bungalow painted
egg-yolk yellow with green trim. But the lawn in front was spectacular. It had sprouted a bumper crop of lawn ornaments. White plastic lambs whose innards had been hollowed out to hold red geraniums; scale models of wooden airplanes with propellers that hummed in the wind; painted plywood cutouts of little German boys with round pink cheeks and stiff wooden lederhosen; a family of wooden ducks, a mother and the babies; a pair of plywood Percherons that pulled a wooden cart full of petunias past a miniature – perfect in every way – of the egg-yolk and green Sawchuk bungalow.