The Early Investigations of Joanne Kilbourn (8 page)

That patronizing “we” ignited something in me. “You seem to forget, Inspector, I have a funeral to go to. I’m not the kind of woman who leaves a friend to go to his grave alone.”

It made no sense, but at that moment it was the best exit line I could muster.

The police station was air conditioned, but by the time I got to the street where I’d parked the Volvo, sweat was running down my back. There was a parking ticket on my windshield. Somehow, I wasn’t surprised. When I reached into my bag for car keys, I pulled out a sheet of orange paper – the list of school supplies Angus needed before they’d let him through the door to grade eight. That didn’t surprise me, either. I wanted a shower, a cold drink with gin in it and a novel in which an inspector of police was first humiliated then killed. But I was not a free agent; I was Angus’s mother. I peeled the ticket off the windshield, put a quarter in the meter, crossed the street and went into the Bay.

I like the way stores look in the last days of summer: the stacks of fresh notebooks, the bright new three-ring binders, the crayons sharp with possibilities. I like the “Back to School” signs – cardboard cutouts of shiny red apples and cartoon bookworms suspended above the school supplies. And the “Back to School” clothes cut from heavy fabrics in deep and glowing colours reassuring us that, after a lightweight summer of ice-cream pastels, life is about to begin again in earnest. It’s a time of hope, and that morning, in spite of everything, I could feel my spirits rise as I ticked off items on Angus’s list.

I saw her by accident. When I was walking toward the boys’ department, I happened to look up and spot the televisions, a bank of them, different makes and models and sizes. And on the screen of every one of them was the face of Eve Boychuk. Twenty Eves looking out at me through twenty pairs of unreadable eyes.

I walked over and turned the sound up on one of the
TVS
. She was amazing – no other word for it. She was reeling from the murder of her husband, but she was opening up her fragile and private world to public scrutiny. Tanned and handsome in a simple blue cotton dress, she was leaning forward,
telling the interviewer that she wanted her husband’s funeral to be something people would remember all their lives. The camera pulled in for a close-up, and there, in the large appliance section of the Bay, Eve was saying that her “dearest wish” was that her husband’s body lie in state in the rotunda of the legislature.

I couldn’t believe my ears. Twenty Eves coolly rebuffing the interviewer’s timid reminder that lying in state was an honour reserved for premiers and lieutenant governors.

“So many people loved Andy,” said all the Eves, “that I’m sure the premier wouldn’t be mean enough to deny people the chance to come to the city to say good-bye.” Oh, she was smooth. For the first time since his party had booted us out of office seven years before, I felt sorry for the baby-faced ex-linebacker who sat behind the big desk in the premier’s office. Eve had flummoxed him.

She had, as it turned out, flummoxed us all. When I walked in the front door of our house, Angus barrelled into me. He was on his way to play baseball, he yelled over his shoulder. I made him come inside to check out his new school supplies.

“Awesome,” he said, deadpan. Then on the porch he turned. “Mum, Mr. Micklejohn has called about eighty-three times and he sounds like he’s going to cry.”

When I picked up the telephone to call Dave, he was already on the line. Not a word about the coincidence of my trying to call him when he was calling me, not a word of greeting. The man who prided himself on taking care of details was starting to crumble. There was no preamble, just, “Jo, something’s going on with Eve. I thought she was going to leave everything to me, then this morning, before I’d even had time for my morning ablutions, she was on the phone giving me directions about the funeral. She is intruding in everything from the choice of pallbearers to the food at the
reception. ‘No perogies, no cabbage rolls.’ That’s what she says. Can you imagine? Did you catch her act on television this morning? She is not the woman we thought she was.”

“Fun is fun till somebody starts to mutate,” I said. “Angus has that written on his science notebook.”

“Kids,” said Dave. “Anyway, what do you think’s up with Eve?”

“I think she’s showing us she can play the game, too. I think she’s showing us that we underestimated her because she wasn’t part of our little circle. And don’t forget, she’s suffering.”

“All of us are suffering, dear. But we’re professionals. We know how to do things right. I don’t think we should have to restructure Andy’s funeral as a confidence-building experience for Eve. However, I don’t know what options we have. The frame of mind she’s in – who knows what she’d do? I need some guidance here, Jo.

“In that case, my advice is to go along with her. Let her give us some general ideas and tell her we’ll work them out. We’ve got the organization. You saw to that.”

At the other end of the phone, I could feel Dave preening. He had a right to.

In the last year of his life, Andy Boychuk had the best organization the province had ever seen, and in large part it was due to Dave Micklejohn. We were as attuned to one another as partners in a trapeze act or a good marriage. We knew one another, and we knew Andy. We loved his strengths, but we also knew his weaknesses, and we worked to make sure no one else did. We all had our reasons for working for Andy Boychuk, and we all had our areas of competence, but the working life of each of us was fuelled by one desire: the need to make our guy look good. So strong was that drive that neither Andy’s death nor Eve’s intrusions stopped us. In those days before the funeral, we kept on going to the Caucus
Office; we kept on working on plans to make sure our guy looked good. “Man makes plans, and God laughs,” said Dave Micklejohn sadly, but we kept on. Planning was a way of thumbing our noses at a universe where a bright and decent man could stand up to give a speech and be murdered before our eyes. And so Dave, who had been, among other things, Andy’s advance man, advanced the funeral – making sure that the routes from the legislature to the cathedral would be lined with people but not congested, that the cathedral could handle an overflow, that the women who were preparing the lunch had ovens that heated and refrigerators that cooled – making certain, in short, that the final public event of Andy Boychuk’s life didn’t blow up in all our faces.

Kelly Sobchuk, who had done itinerary, planned the times and places all of us would be the day of the funeral. Lorraine Bellegarde, who had done correspondence, kept track of the memorial donations and flowers and letters that poured into the office first by hundreds and then thousands. Janice Summers, who had been Andy’s principal secretary, made certain that out-of-province
VIPS
and in-province political powers had hotel rooms and schedules and transportation. And there were a half dozen more of us working at a half dozen other jobs efficiently and bleakly.

Every so often a kind of wild gallows humour would erupt. Around five o’clock one steamy afternoon before the funeral, I walked into the offices of the Official Opposition. A bottle of Crown Royal was open on the desk and another was empty in the wastebasket. About five of our people had gathered to hear Lorraine Bellegarde read the mail: a man in Ituna promised to deliver thirty thousand votes for us in the next election if we sent him Andy’s clothes, “since I am his identical size and he has no further need for same”; a woman in Stuart Valley had made Andy a pair of slipper socks out of white flannel. She made them, she said, “for all my departeds
because I don’t like to think of them going over the line with bare feet, but let’s call a spade a spade: there’s no point in wasting good money on shoes for them.” Two men who had seen Eve on television sent proposals of marriage, and one woman who was a cosmetologist from the southwest of the province told Eve she would look ten years younger if she had her hair cut into a “soft bob” and dyed it a colour called Hidden Honey. A stubby sample of human hair – like a paintbrush – was taped to the page. I had a drink and walked out of the building into the heat. I couldn’t seem to get into the spirit. There were no more speeches to write, but I couldn’t see beyond the day of Andy’s funeral. Maybe I didn’t want to.

My life between Andy’s murder on Sunday afternoon and the Friday morning of his funeral had a shapeless, anarchic quality.

“I’m walking around doing things but none of them seems very real,” I said to Dave Micklejohn one sweltering morning when I met him outside the legislature.

“Here,” he said, slapping a five-dollar bill into my hand. “Do you want a sense of reality, Jo, dear? Go downtown and get Eve a pair of panty hose for the funeral – taupe, all nylon, no spandex, cotton crotch, queen size – not, you understand, because our Eve is fat but because she is tall.” He was joking, but I went. You didn’t have to be a psychiatrist to see that he was close to cracking.

There was no pattern at home, either. The boys didn’t go back to school till after Labour Day, and Mieka was to start university in Saskatoon in the middle of September, so our lives were ad hoc, listless, like the lives of people who are stuck in a strange city by an airline strike or bad weather.

Part of the sense of strangeness could, I knew, be traced to the fact that on Tuesday, two days after the murder, the kids and I had moved into the granny flat. It was Peter’s idea – a way for us all to get away from the heat.

Our house on Eastlake Avenue was built in 1911, and like all old houses it had dozens of cracks and crannies through which winter and summer air passed freely. Air conditioning would have been a waste there. But the granny flat was another matter.

There was a sprawling double garage behind our house, and the previous owner had had a flat built over it for his mother. It was one large room with a kitchenette and a bathroom. She had allergies, so it was sealed tight as a tomb. With a flick of a switch you could have it cool enough to refrigerate a side of beef or hot enough to slow cook it.

The granny flat had been the place where Ian worked on lectures for his human justice class, and on more than one lazy afternoon, a place where we made love. When he died, I moved in the books and notes for my dissertation. Now it was my office, but for me it was more than that. The granny flat was a place where I could mourn or sit staring into space without fear of worrying the children or of being seen to look like a fool.

When Ian had had his office there, he’d panelled the walls in knotty pine and had bookshelves built along one wall. There was a desk, a good leather chair for the desk, a reclining chair for reading, a brown corduroy couch that made up into a hideaway bed, and that was it. The decorating was fifties
Argosy
magazine, but the room had a cottagey feeling I liked.

The Christmas before Ian died I’d ordered a braided rag rug from Quebec as a surprise. It is a joyful splash of colour in that sombre room. The rug and a wall full of photographs Ian’s mother sent me after he was killed are the only changes I’ve made. The pictures are a chronicle of Ian and his brother, Jack, growing up. I don’t know what a grief counsellor would say about the hours I spend standing in front of the pictures, but it helps. There is something comforting about the neat
and inevitable progression of those young lives: from babies who stare wide-eyed, then beam as they sit, then walk, to boys who hold dogs and play baseball and ride bikes, to young men, faces suddenly serious under strangely dated haircuts, who hold the arms of girls in billowy dresses, and graduate, and receive awards.

I wonder now if Peter didn’t believe we all needed the healing power of those pictures when he suggested we carry our sleeping bags into the cool peace of the granny flat until Andy’s funeral. Whatever the reason, we moved. And in those still, hot evenings before the funeral, we turned up the air conditioner, ate ice cream from Bertolucci’s and worked hard at doing nothing. The boys watched baseball on the portable
TV
, and they brought the
VCR
over so they could watch movies when there wasn’t a game. Mieka and I read through a stack of old women’s magazines she’d bought at a garage sale.

It seemed in that cool apartment we could, for a few hours, seal ourselves off from the hot world of pain and insanity that surrounded us. And it was in those rooms that I decided to write Andy Boychuk’s biography.

It was a decision that almost cost me my life.

It began on the morning of the Taber corn. At around seven o’clock, somebody started pounding on the door. When I opened it, Howard Dowhanuik was standing there. Over his shoulder, Santa style, was a gunny sack of corn.

“Jesus, Jo, I thought you guys were all dead. I just about smashed down the front door of the house, and then I remembered this place. What’re you all doing up here, anyway?”

“It’s cooler for sleeping.”

“Well, it’s not going to be for long if we stand here with the door open. Aren’t you going to invite me in?”

“Howard, would you like to come in?”

“Yeah, I would, and I’d like some coffee. Look, I brought some corn for breakfast. A guy was setting up a stand at a gas station out on Dewdney. He drove in from Alberta this morning – first Taber corn of the season. Let’s get some water boiling. I’m starving. Peter, go over to the house and get a pot. Angus and I’ll start husking this. C’mon, c’mon. Let’s look alive, everybody.”

Laughing and grumbling, we began to look alive. The kids had always liked Howard, and since Ian’s death, they seemed to treasure his rough kindnesses. They liked to be with him. So did I.

I made coffee. Howard cooked the corn and it was wonderful, indescribably delicate and sweet. Mieka unearthed a half gallon of peach ice cream and a Mieka cheesecake from the deep-freeze. It was an oddly comforting meal, and after Howard left to go to the legislature, I poured myself another cup of coffee and sat back in the reclining chair.

The room was filled with sunshine and the sweet smell of corn and butter. The boys were playing canasta – that summer they’d exhausted the possibilities of every card game but that one. Mieka, barefoot and in her cotton nightie, was sitting in the window seat, a stack of
Ladies’ Home Journals
and
Chatelaines
beside her. It was a moment of rare peace.