The Further Investigations of Joanne Kilbourn (3 page)

“I thought you’d welcome a little sustenance,” Hilda said, as she poured the Irish whiskey.

“Where did the bread come from?” I asked.

“Taylor and I made it this afternoon. It’s called barm brack; it’s traditional in Ireland at Hallowe’en.”

I cut myself a slice and bit into it. It tasted of spice and candied peel and fruit. “Good,” I said.

“The children didn’t think so,” Hilda said drily. “They were polite, but they didn’t exactly wolf it down.”

“All the more for us,” I said and took another bite. My teeth hit something papery and hard. I raised my hand to my mouth and took the paper out.

Hilda laughed, “I should have warned you. The barm brack is full of little charms. Of course, you’ve already discovered that.”

I looked at the waxed paper triangle in my hand.

“Open it,” Hilda said. “The charm you get is supposed to foretell your future. Angus got the gold coin.”

“Good,” I said, “my old age is taken care of.” I opened the paper in my hand. Inside was a baby doll, no larger than my thumbnail.

“I must have someone else’s fortune,” I said. “I’m forty-nine years old, Hilda. I think my child-bearing days are over.”

“The barm brack is never wrong,” Hilda said placidly. “The baby in your future could belong to someone else, you know.”

I thought of my older daughter and her husband. A grandchild. It was a nice thought. I lifted my glass of Jameson’s to Hilda. “To Irish traditions,” I said. “And to Irish stories. You know I’d forgotten that story about poor Jack O’Lantern with his turnip. My mother-in-law told it to me years ago.”

Hilda looked thoughtful. “Your husband was Irish, wasn’t he?”

“His family was. Ian was born here.” I sipped my whisky. “And, as you saw on the news tonight, he died here.”

“I remember the case, of course,” she said. “It was before you and I met. It struck me as being a particularly brutal and senseless death.”

“That about sums it up,” I said. “At first, I thought the brutality was the hardest part to deal with. Isn’t there a prayer where you ask God to grant you a good death?”

Hilda nodded.

“Well, Ian’s death was not good. It was vicious and terrifying. He was beaten to death by a stranger. It was during the week between Christmas and New Year’s. He was on the Trans-Canada, coming back from a funeral in Swift Current. There was a blizzard. A car had broken down by the side of the highway. When Ian stopped to help, Kevin Tarpley, that man who was killed today, asked Ian to take him and his girlfriend to a party. At the trial, Kevin Tarpley said that when Ian refused, he smashed Ian’s head in with a crowbar.”

The shadow shapes on the ceiling shifted. In the stillness I could hear the ticking of the hall clock, regular as a heartbeat.

“I had nightmares for months about what he must have gone through in those last minutes. But in the long run, it wasn’t the brutality that drove me crazy; it was the lack of
logic. It turned out that Kevin Tarpley’s car hadn’t broken down at all. When the police found it, it was fine. Kevin told them he got scared when the needle on the heat gauge went into the red zone.” I leaned across the table. “Hilda, my husband died because a boy panicked. Isn’t that crazy? But everything about Ian’s death was senseless. Did you know he went to that funeral in Swift Current because he lost a coin toss?”

Hilda shook her head. “That particular cruelty didn’t make the papers.”

“We were at a Boxing Day party the Caucus Office had for families who’d stayed in town for the holidays. I guess everyone had had a couple of drinks when Howard remembered that somebody had to go to Charlie Heinbecker’s funeral the next day. Charlie was …”

“Minister of Agriculture in Howard’s first government. I remember him well,” Hilda said. “He was a fine man.”

“He was,” I agreed, “but it’s a long drive to Swift Current, and that time of year the roads can be treacherous. Nobody wanted to volunteer. Anyway, somebody decided all the M.L.A.s who knew Charlie should toss a coin. They did, and Ian lost. The next morning he drove off, and I never saw him again. Hilda, it could just as easily have been Howard or Jane or Gary or any of them on that road.”

“But it wasn’t.”

“No,” I said, “it wasn’t.”

The light from the fireplace struck the silver moon on Hilda’s necklace and turned it to fire. When she spoke again, her voice was as old as time:

“…  this invites the occult mind,
Cancels our physics with a sneer,
And spatters all we knew of denouement
Across the expedient and wicked stones.”

Suddenly, I was so tired I could barely move.

“Hilda, how can we live if the only answer is that there are no answers?”

She leaned across the table. Her eyes were as impenetrable as agate. “That’s not what the poem says, Joanne. It says there always are answers. They may sicken us and they may terrify us, but that doesn’t make them any less true, and it doesn’t make them any less powerful.”

She picked up a knife and sliced into the barm brack. “Now, let’s have some bread and a little more whisky before the fire dies.”

After Hilda went up to bed, I walked through the darkened house, checking, making sure we were safe. As I locked the front door, I glanced through the glass and saw our jack o’lantern on the porch, its candle guttering in the October darkness.

I opened the door and, hugging myself against the cold, I blew out the candle, picked up the pumpkin, and brought it back into the kitchen. When I moved Angus’s schoolbooks along the counter to make a place for the jack o’lantern, I uncovered a small stack of mail. There wasn’t much: a new
Owl
magazine for Taylor, a bill from Columbia House addressed to Angus, a pretty postcard inviting me to the opening of a visiting show of Impressionist landscapes at the Mackenzie Gallery, and an envelope, standard size, nine by twelve. My students had had essays due the day before, and my first thought was that the envelope held an essay from one of them, trying to limit the penalty for a late paper. But when I glanced at the envelope, I noticed that the letters of my name and address were oddly formed, as if the writer couldn’t decide between printing and writing. I opened the envelope. There was a letter in the same curiously unformed hand.

Dear Mrs. Kilbourn,

I must be the last one you thought youd here from but this is important.
WE MUST ALL APPEAR BEFORE THE JUDGEMENT SEAT OF CHRIST, THAT EVERY ONE MAY RECEIVE THE THINGS DONE IN HIS BODY, ACCORDING TO THAT HE HATH DONE, WHETHER IT BE GOOD OR BAD
. (2
CORINTHIANS
, 5) But the Rev. Paschal Temple says I must try to atone on this side of the grave for the wrongs I did. I’m sorry for what happened to your husband, but things are not what they seem. You may hate me, but pay attention to what I wrote on the picture because it is not My Truth. It is God’s Truth.

Kevin Tarpley

Attached to the letter with a paperclip was a newspaper clipping. It was the publicity photo for Howard Dowhanuik’s dinner. I was in the middle, looking slightly dazed as I always seem to in photos. On my left was Craig Evanson, and beside him was Tess Malone. On my right were Jane O’Keefe and Gary Stephens. Jane was holding the whimsical ceramic statue of Howard that the party was going to present to him the night of the roast. Kevin Tarpley had cut off the original caption of the photo and taped on a piece of scribbler paper. There was a quotation printed in block letters on the paper:
“PUT NOT YOUR TRUST IN RULERS, PSALM
146.”

I was standing in my own kitchen. The air was pungent with the smells of burned pumpkin meat and candle wax – good familiar smells. Upstairs my children and my friend were sleeping, safe and happy. In the hall, the clock struck twelve, and I could feel my nerves twang. Hallowe’en was over. It was All Saints’ Day, the day to remember “our brethren departed,” and I had just received a warning from a dead man.

CHAPTER

2

When I looked out my bedroom window at 7:00 a.m. on All Saints’ Day, the world was grey, the colour of half-mourning the Victorians wore when the first black-edged grief was over. Fog blanketed everything. Rose, our golden retriever, came over to the window and nudged me hopefully.

“I don’t suppose you’d forgo the walk this morning,” I said. She looked anxious. “I withdraw the suggestion,” I said. I pulled on my jogging pants and a sweatshirt and found my running shoes under the bed. When I was ready, I went into Angus’s room. Our collie was sleeping in her usual place at the end of his bed.

“Come on, Sadie,” I said, “no rest for the wicked.” As I walked through the kitchen, I plugged in the coffee and took a coffee cake and a pound of bacon out of the freezer. On Sundays, I declared all the food in our house cholesterol-free.

As the dogs and I ran down the steps from Albert Street to the north shore of Wascana Lake, I was chilled by the wind off the water. It was an ugly morning. Usually, when I stood on the lakeshore, I could see the graceful lines of the Legislature that had been the focal point of so much of my
adult life, but today the legislative building was just a shape, dark and foreboding in the fog, and the lake where Ian and I had canoed in summer and taught our children to skate in winter was bleak. Around the shoreline, ice was starting to form, and it pressed, swollen with garbage, against the shore. The geese in the middle of the lake seemed frozen, lifeless as decoys. Every spring Ian and I had taken the kids to the park to feed the new goslings; by midsummer the birds, wise in the ways of the park, would run at us if we forgot to bring them bread. Ian used to call them the goose-punks.

As I crossed the bridge along the parkway, Nabokov’s description of a room of his childhood floated to the top of my consciousness. “Everything is as it should be. Nothing will ever change. Nobody will ever die.” Numb with cold and the pain of memory, I turned south and headed for home.

I could hear Taylor the minute I walked through the door. She was in the kitchen talking on the telephone. She was still in her pajamas, and there was a half-eaten candy apple in her hand. When she saw me, she grinned and waved it. As I took the dogs off their leashes and set the table, Taylor’s flutey little-girl voice was telling the person on the other end of the phone about Hallowe’en.

“At the house on the corner by the bridge, there was a Count Dracula giving out candy, and he had pointed teeth and blood on his chin, but Jess said it was fake, and next door to Count Dracula there was just an ordinary man but he gave out
UNICEF
money and McDonald’s coupons and then there was …”

I turned on the oven, put in a pan of bacon and the coffee cake, then started upstairs. Angus and Hilda were in the living room, drinking orange juice and talking about Shakespeare. Hilda had taught high-school English for forty-five years, and Angus had an essay on
Othello
due the next day. I gave them the thumbs-up sign and tiptoed by. When I had showered and
came back downstairs, the kitchen smelled of bacon and cinnamon, and Taylor was in mid-sentence. “Sixteen packets of Chiclets,” she was saying, “thirty-two little candy bars, a lot of candy kisses, seven bags of peanuts …”

“Okay, T,” I said, “that’s enough. Time to get off the phone.”

She smiled and held out the receiver. “It’s for you,” she said. “Long distance.”

Keith Harris was on the other end of the line.

“Tell me you didn’t reverse the charges,” I said.

“I didn’t reverse the charges,” he said, “and it was worth every penny. Taylor has a nice narrative style – very thorough. It was almost like being there.”

“I’ll bet it was,” I said, as I watched her disappear into the living room with her candy apple.

When Keith spoke again, his voice was serious. “Jo, one of the Canadian press guys just told me about Kevin Tarpley. He didn’t know much. Just that Tarpley was shot, and the police were investigating.”

“That’s all I know too, except … Keith, I got a letter from Kevin Tarpley last night.”

Keith swore softly.

“Apparently,” I said, “when he was in prison, he was born again. Just as well, considering the events of the past twenty-four hours. Anyway, he wrote me a letter full of scriptural warnings and advice about how I should live my life.”

“Is there anything I can do?”

“There’s nothing anybody can do.” I could hear the petulance in my voice. It was as unappealing as petulance usually is. I took a deep breath and started again. “Keith, I’m sorry. It’s just that that whole time was so terrible, not just Ian dying, but the trial and our lives splashed all over the papers. I didn’t want to think about any of it ever again. And now …”

“And now you have a chance to put an end to it once and for all.” Keith’s voice was strong and certain. “Jo, has it occurred to you that maybe that poor bastard Tarpley has done you a favour? Maybe now that he’s dead, you really can close the door. You’ve got a lot to look forward to, you know: the kids, your job, the show.”

“But not you, anymore,” I said. “How’s the lady lobbyist?”

“She’s fine. Jo, I thought we’d agreed to keep her out of it.”

“Sorry,” I said. “Being dumped isn’t any easier at forty-nine than it was at fourteen.”

“You weren’t dumped,” he said. “It was a joint decision.”

“Yes, but you made the joint decision first. Look, let’s change the subject. What’s happening in Washington today?”

“I’m having lunch with some Texas bankers.”

“Three fingers of Jack Daniel’s and a platter of ribs. You lucky duck.”

“Actually, we’re eating at a place in Georgetown that specializes in braised zucchini.”

“Good,” I said. “Being dumped is one thing. But knowing you’re having great barbecue while I’m eating Spaghetti-O’s would just be too much.”

He laughed. “The day you eat Spaghetti-O’s …”

“Listen, I’d better let you get rolling,” I said. “The cost for this phone call must be into four digits.”

“Money well spent,” he said. “Take care of yourself, Jo.”

“You too,” I said.

The next phone call wasn’t as heartening. It was a reporter from one of our local radio stations. He told me his name was Troy Smith-Windsor, and he asked me how I felt about Kevin Tarpley’s death.