The Early Investigations of Joanne Kilbourn (27 page)

I felt so tired I didn’t think I could move out of the chair. But I stood up and held my arms out to her. She came and laid her head on my shoulder. She was Mieka’s size. It felt good to hold her. Her hair smelled like apples.

“You did the right thing, Lori. You didn’t betray anybody. Mrs. Evanson was the one who did the betraying. I’ll make it all right with Craig – I promise. Now go in there and wash your face and bundle up your little guy and take him for a walk in the leaves. It’ll do you both good.”

Her lovely face shone with gratitude. Someone had taken the burden away. Someone had taken over. She looked better already.

I drove to the Evanson house on Gardner Crescent. All the way to the city, my chest muscles ached and my heart banged against the hollow of my rib cage. But I wasn’t sick.
The doctor had told me. It was all in my head. I pounded on the front door.

“Come on, Julie. Come on out here and deal with your mess.”

She was wearing a flowered silk dress, the colour of raspberries, and her hair was a smooth platinum cap.

“I was just going out,” she said, and then an honest outburst, “Joanne, you look like …”

“I know, I look like hell. Let me in, Julie. You’re not going anywhere.”

The dining-room table was covered in photographer’s contact sheets. I picked one up. Some of Craig, some of both of them.

“Picking the official photo for the new leader?” I asked. “What’s your stand on justice, Julie? Are you for it or against it? How about the family? How about the dim and trusting? In favour of giving them full employment doing your dirty work?”

“You’d better leave, Joanne. You’re hysterical.”

“No, Julie, I’m not. I’m just sick of people dying and people being hurt.” A spasm of nausea hit me, and the metal taste came into my mouth, then the saliva. “What’s your game, Julie? Why did you set Eve up? Why did you have your daughter-in-law, who is as innocent as she is slow, call Eve and tell her to go to Soren’s office the morning he was murdered?”

Julie had gone pale under her makeup. Her hands were clenched into fists.

“That’s family business, Joanne.”

“That’s where you’re wrong. It’s police business, and I’m going to drive down there now and tell them to pile into a cop car, turn on the sirens and come and get you, Julie. They’ll be so interested. Cops are funny that way. They wait
and wait, and then finally they look at all the evidence” – I shook the contact sheets in her face – “and they figure, well, what’s her connection here? How is the wife of this guy who wants to be premier involved? What the hell is going on? That’s what they do, Julie. Take my word for it.”

She grabbed me by the wrists and brought her face close to mine. Her breath smelled of coffee.

“Send the police here,” she said, “and I’ll tell them your beloved Andy Boychuk was a fag.”

For a moment, my eyes lost their focus. Julie’s face blurred; I blinked, and she became clear again.

“What did you say?” My voice sounded small and frightened.

She pushed her advantage. “You heard me, I said Andy was a faggot. You know, Joanne” – She moved her face so close to mine our noses almost touched – “a pansy, a fruit, a fairy, a ho-mo-sex-u-al.” She enunciated each syllable of the word.

“I’ll tell them myself,” I said and I shook my wrists loose from her grasp and headed for the door. “After I tell them about how you set up Eve Boychuk.”

It worked. I’d called her bluff, and she gave in.

“Jo, wait. Hear my side.”

I turned the doorknob.

“Not for me, but for Craig. I know you still like him.”

I walked into the living room and sank into a chair by the window. Across the road the trees on the creek bank were bronze and gold in the October light. It seemed impossible that there could be such beauty out there, while in here …

“All right, Julie, let’s hear your side.”

Julie’s story was weird enough to be credible and unsettling. Early on the morning that Soren Eames’s body was discovered, the phone had rung. She’d answered it “in this room here,” she said, gesturing to the living room. It was a man’s
voice on the other end. He identified himself as a supporter of Craig Evanson, and he said he’d come upon some information that could clinch the nomination for Craig. The man was, Julie told me, very knowledgeable about their campaign. His estimate of the number of delegates supporting Craig was just about the same as Julie’s. What the man knew and what Julie knew was that Craig didn’t have enough votes for a first-ballot win, and it didn’t seem likely that he’d be the one who would pick up votes on the next ballots. “You and I know,” the man had said, “that it isn’t going to work for him unless you can get some of the Boychuk loyalists to support him.” Julie looked at me. “He mentioned your name, Joanne, and Dave Micklejohn’s, and he said to me, ‘You know who the others are’ and of course, I did. He said the only way ‘to pry you people loose’ – that was the phrase he used – was to get someone you trusted to ask you to support Craig, and the person he named was Eve. He said that if I could get Eve into Soren Eames’s office within the hour, Eames would give Eve some information that would guarantee she’d do what she was told about the election.”

“What did you say?” I asked.

“It was all so bizarre, and it was early, before seven, I think, but I remember I said, ‘What’s the information?’ He didn’t say anything for a while, and then he kind of laughed and said, ‘Well, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t know. Soren Eames has information that will prove that Andy Boychuk was involved in a sordid homosexual liaison at the time of his death. Eames has agreed to keep quiet if Eve can get the people around her to support Craig Evanson.’ ”

“Did that make sense to you, Julie?”

“I told you, it was early in the morning, Jo, and face it, he was saying what I wanted to hear. After I’d called Lori, I thought about it. And it did make sense. Eames could have wanted to help Craig out of loyalty to Mark and Lori. And,
you know, some of those fundamentalist churches really hate homosexuals. If Soren had come upon that kind of information, he might have felt he had to use it.

“Anyway, I called Lori. Joanne, you’ll have to believe me. I didn’t mean to hurt Eve. But …” And then the old Julie was back, defiant and shrill. “It’s not my fault Eve went crazy and killed him.” She looked at me. “Are you going to the police?”

“Not this minute, but I suggest you do.” I stood and started for the door. “Julie, do you remember anything at all about the man on the phone? Even a general impression?”

She looked thoughtful. “I don’t know. He was agitated, and that ‘sordid homosexual liaison’ thing seemed overdone.”

“Yes,” I agreed, “it sounds that way to me, too.” My hand was on the doorknob again. “Well, Julie, I’ll be seeing you.”

“Joanne?” Her voice was small and tentative.

I turned wearily, prepared for a last-ditch appeal that would keep me from exposing her to the police.

“Julie, what is it?”

She looked around then lowered her voice. “It’s someone we know, Joanne.”

“Who?”

“The man on the phone. He’d muffled his voice, but I still knew it. And he knew so much about our campaign and so much about all of us – about Andy’s people. It’s someone close to us, Jo. It has to be someone we know.”

Where to begin? I sat in the granny flat and thought about what I had to go on. The muffled voice on Julie’s telephone; Howard Dowhanuik’s voice, exasperated and embarrassed: “For God’s sake, Jo, it’s been almost twenty years. Andy said it was his one and only.” I stared at the vertical files and finally I picked up four and put them on my desk. I chose 1961, 1962, 1963 and 1964 – Andy’s high-school years, the years of sexual awakening. It seemed as good a place as any to start.

There wasn’t much in the files. Some photos of Andy receiving awards from the Knights of Columbus for essays on chastity and obedience. Roma had given me those. Four years of
Intra Muros
, the yearbook of E.T. Russell High School in Saskatoon. Four years of photos of Andy with his class, with the debating team, with the track team. Four years of end-of-the-year messages. “I’ll never forget you,” “To a great guy,” from girls named Barbara Ann and Gloria and Sharon, and joking insults from people who signed off, “Just kidding, your great!!!” Remembering my own yearbook, I shook my head, smiled and started to shut the cover
of
Intra Muros
. In the corner, tiny and feathery, was some writing that had been obscured by my thumb. I bent to look at it more closely. “Forever, E.” I looked again at the cover: 1964, grade twelve, graduation year. I looked at the signatures in the other years of
Intra Muros
. Nothing. I went back to 1964. There were forty-five people in the graduating class. Counting surnames and given names, in Andy’s class alone there were twenty-three people with the initial E. Those had been big years for Elizabeths and Edwards.

There was a group photo of the class. Andy’s teacher looked like an original – hair frizzed out to shoulder length, hoop earrings, gypsy scarf, dirndl skirt – but even in the halftones of an old school photo she had an air of great vitality. I looked at the bottom of the page. Of course, Hilda McCourt. The one with the dazzling red hair and the sharp tongue who’d been onstage the day Andy was murdered and who’d been so angry with me when I underestimated her memory at the lunch after the funeral.

She lived, I knew, in Saskatoon. Andy used to take her out for dinner every so often when he was up there. I thought of Saskatoon, and I remembered hugging Lori that morning and the smell of apples in her hair. Then I thought how good it would be to hold my own daughter, and I picked up the phone and dialled information. Five minutes later, I had arranged to meet Hilda McCourt the next day before noon.

When Rick phoned that night, we talked for close to an hour. Like me, he sensed that the pieces were there if only we could see the pattern. I didn’t mention my illness. There was no point because it wasn’t there. It wasn’t real. All in my head.

The next morning, when I went to get dressed, the first two skirts I tried on hung on me. When the waistband of the third skirt gaped, too, I went into Mieka’s room, found a
wide belt and belted the skirt tight. Sort of like Scotch-taping a drooping hem, but I was starting to simplify.

It was a mild day, but I was freezing. I put on a heavy sweater and then, when that wasn’t enough, I went to the basement and dug out my winter coat. The phone rang as I was about to go out the door. It was Dr. Philip Lee’s office, and they’d had a cancellation for the next day, late afternoon. Was I interested? If I left Saskatoon after lunch I’d make it easily. As soon as I hung up, I was hit with a knot of abdominal cramps. Just my body’s way of saying I had made a good decision, I thought, as I waited till the cramping stopped. I made a few arrangements with the boys, picked up my car keys, slung my purse over my shoulder and went out the door. It wasn’t quite 8:30 a.m. With luck, I’d have had my talk with Hilda McCourt and be at Mieka’s by noon.

About an hour out of the city, the cramping hit again, and the diarrhea. I was lucky. There was a gas station with a garage – a real garage, the kind where men in coveralls come to watch other men in coveralls peer into the bowels of vehicles. There was a smell of oil and gasoline and something else – an artificial pine smell that must have come from the display of cardboard deodorant pine trees by the cash register.

When I came from the bathroom, the man in the station looked up at me curiously.

“You all right, lady?”

“Fine thanks … Just the aftermath of the flu.”

“It’s going around,” he said sagely, and then, surprisingly, “There’s coffee, but let me get you some tea. I had that flu and it’s a bitch. The tea will settle you, so you can get to … I suppose you’re going to Saskatoon.”

I nodded.

“Two more hours. If you feel as crappy as I did, you’ll need something. Put lotsa sugar in it for energy.”

The tea got me to Davidson, a little more than halfway. Again, there was the cramping, like a fist tightening in my lower stomach, then I broke out in a cold sweat. I pulled into the parking lot behind a hotel and shook. Then I went into the hotel coffee shop, which was almost empty at this time of morning and still smelled of stale beer from the pub across the hall.

There were cardboard cutouts of pumpkins and skeletons on the mirror behind the counter, and a young albino girl with her back to me was taping orange and black crepe paper around the mirror’s edge. On the radio, a woman who said she was a witch was taking calls on a phone-in show. The girl never said a word. She blinked at me incuriously through her white lashes while I gave her my order, set the soup down carefully in front of me, brought a glass of water and a cellophane-wrapped package of crackers and went back to taping her crepe paper. On the radio, the witch was explaining the witch’s alphabet.

The soup and the fresh air seemed to do the trick. By the time I got to Hilda McCourt’s neat little house on Avenue B, I felt better. When I rang the doorbell, Hilda came around the side of the house from the backyard. The October sunlight was kind to her. She looked her age – eighty, give or take a year – but she looked great. She was wearing lime-green coveralls and a lime-green and cerise cotton shirt. Both had labels from a designer who had dominated the youth market for the past couple of years. She had covered her brilliantly dyed red hair with a scarf, and a slash of lipstick – cerise to match her blouse – was feathered across her lips. Her smile when she greeted me was as open and vital as the smile on her face when she posed with Class 12-A, E.T. Russell H.S. (1964).

“Come around back with me. I’m just about through turning over my garden for the winter. Carpe diem. We
may not get many more days like this. I’m going overseas for a short holiday next week, and I want to leave everything shipshape.”

“It looks shipshape to me already,” I said when we came into the backyard. Orange plastic garbage bags full of leaves were neatly lined up against the garage, shrubs were tied with sacking, rosebushes were covered in dirt, and the flower beds had all been turned over.