The Further Investigations of Joanne Kilbourn (52 page)

Annalie laughed, not pleasantly. “It wasn’t similar; it was identical. I was the prototype: the ugly girl who worked hard and came up with something the handsome young man wanted; the ugly girl who couldn’t make anybody believe her when she said the handsome young man was pursuing her sexually. Mrs. Kilbourn, Reed Gallagher called me because he was suddenly facing the possibility that twenty years ago, when he believed the handsome young man instead of believing me, he’d put his money on the wrong horse.”

I thought of Tom Kelsoe taking the picture of Reed and Annalie and shoving it into the paper-towel receptacle in the Faculty Club washroom. Suddenly, in the midst of all the questions, there was one answer. “The man who did that to you was Tom Kelsoe, wasn’t it?” I said.

“Yes.” Annalie’s voice was low with anger. “It was Tom, and I’ll tell you something else. Without knowing any of the circumstances of Kellee’s death, I can assure you that when the facts come to light, you’ll discover that that bastard Kelsoe might as well have been holding a pistol to her head.”

After that, Annalie’s account of her relationship with Tom Kelsoe tumbled out. Twenty years had passed, but the pain of what Tom Kelsoe had done to her was still acute.

Like so many tragedies, Annalie’s grew out of an act of misplaced altruism. When Annalie left her home town and moved to Toronto to study journalism, she was lonely and homesick. Working on the premise that one way out of her misery might be to help someone whose problems were larger than her own, she became a volunteer at a private hospice for children with incurable diseases. The place was called Sunshine House, and it didn’t take Annalie long to realize that it was an institution with serious problems:
administrative staff had thin credentials and fat expense accounts; the personnel charged with the care of the children were incompetent or indifferent; the children themselves were casually ignored or abused. Despite the conditions, Annalie stayed on for two and a half years – in part because she felt the children needed an ally, and in part because she was patiently building up a dossier on the mismanagement at Sunshine House.

By the time Annalie Brinkmann and Tom Kelsoe were thrown together in an investigative journalism class, two things had happened: the dossier on Sunshine House was bulging, and Annalie had been fired as a volunteer. She’d been caught in the director’s office photocopying a particularly damning file. Sunshine House was about to launch a major fundraising campaign, and they had put together a series of heartbreaking pictures of dying children; the problem was the children had all been recruited from a modelling agency, and they were all healthy as horses. The director of Sunshine House had been brutal in his internal memorandum justifying the expense of hiring professionals: “a picture of any of the kids here would make Mr. and Mrs. John Q. Public throw up. We’re not going to get our target group to write big cheques if they’ve got their eyes closed.”

Even without the modelling-agency file, Annalie knew she had a story, but the director’s letter was dynamite, and she wanted it. When a fellow student in the investigative journalism class confided that he hadn’t come up with a subject for his major report, Annalie thought she’d found a perfect fit. No one at Sunshine House would suspect a connection between her and Tom Kelsoe. Tom could copy the relevant file and dig up whatever other dirt he could find. He would come out of the experience with enough material for a term paper, and she’d have a shining bauble to dangle in front of the Toronto media.

It was, in Annalie’s mind, a fair exchange, but after agreeing to her plan, Tom Kelsoe decided not to trade. After he’d photocopied the modelling-agency file, he told Annalie he’d unearthed some material that was even more damaging, and that he needed time to bring it to light. When she objected, he surprised her by making a crude but unmistakable pass.

The pattern continued. Every time she pressed him about the file, he fondled her and murmured about their future together. Annalie was, by her own assessment, both plain and naive. She had never had a date in her life. A more experienced young woman would have seen through Tom Kelsoe’s ploy, but Annalie didn’t. She believed the lies and she enjoyed the sexual stirrings. She created a fantasy in which she and Tom were journalists, travelling the world together, famous and enviable. She knew the Sunshine House story was their entrée into the glittering media world. So complete was her belief in the fantasy that, on the day she passed a newsstand and saw the Sunshine House exposé on page one of the evening paper, her first thought was that Tom had surprised her by getting their story published. When she saw that the only name on the by-line was Tom Kelsoe’s, she fell apart.

By the time she pulled herself together enough to go to Reed Gallagher, Tom Kelsoe had beaten her to the punch. Tom’s version of the story had enough basis in truth to be credible. He acknowledged that Annalie had been a volunteer at Sunshine House, but he said she’d been fired before she had anything more solid than suspicions. He acknowledged that Annalie had suggested that he volunteer his services at Sunshine House, but he said the story he dug up was all his own.

Then Tom Kelsoe made a pre-emptive strike. He confided to Reed that he had a terrible personal problem. Annalie
had, Tom explained, become obsessed with him. She was phoning him at all hours of the night, following him on the street. He was, he told Reed, afraid for her sanity, but he was also afraid for himself.

Annalie said Reed had been very compassionate with her, very concerned. He heard her story, then he suggested she seek counselling. When she objected, he talked gently to Annalie about the importance of a journalist’s good name. When that didn’t work, he talked less gently about the possibility that, if she kept harassing him, Tom might be compelled to seek legal redress against her. By the time she left Reed’s office, Annalie knew that Reed Gallagher hadn’t believed a word she’d said. She also knew she had no alternative but to withdraw from J school.

She’d been lucky. She’d got a job at a small
FM
station that played classical music, and had been there ever since. She had married. Her husband didn’t want children. He didn’t like confusion. It had been, Annalie said, a very quiet life.

“But a good one,” I said.

She laughed. “Yes,” she said, “I’ve had a good life, but then so has Tom Kelsoe.”

The first item on the 6:00 news was Constable Desjardin’s announcement that the name of the woman whose body had been found in the farmer’s field was Kellee Savage. When I made the identification of the body at the hospital, I had thought the worst was over, but the official announcement of Kellee’s death hit me hard. There were no surprises in the way the television story unfolded; nonetheless, as Marissa’s image was replaced by shots of the area in which the body had been found, and as the death scene faded into the inevitable interview with the finder of the body, I started to shake.

I turned off the television. I didn’t need
TV
images to underscore a truth that seemed more and more unassailable:
Reed Gallagher’s death hadn’t been accidental. I didn’t know who killed him, and I didn’t know why, but I was sure of one thing: as soon as I knew what had happened to Kellee in the hours before she started her final, fatal walk home, a giant piece in the puzzle of Reed’s death would slide into place. A theory was starting to gather at the edges of my mind, but a theory without substantiation wasn’t enough. I needed proof. Annalie Brinkmann’s story had been compelling, but if I was going to prove that Tom Kelsoe was behind Val Massey’s harassment of Kellee, I had to have more to go on than a twenty-year-old story from a woman I didn’t know. I needed to come up with some solid reasons why Kellee Savage had been worth attacking.

There was another reason I needed proof. If I was going to blow Tom Kelsoe out of the water, I had to make sure Jill was ready for the blast. She deserved to know the truth, and that meant waiting until I was absolutely certain what the truth was. I called Rapti Lustig to see if she knew when Jill would be back from Toronto. Rapti said Jill had called her to say she had a meeting Saturday morning, but she’d be back in time for the show. That meant she’d be on the late-afternoon flight. I started to ask Rapti for Jill’s number in Toronto, but decided against it. If I phoned Jill to tell her I wanted to pick her up at the airport, she’d have questions, and, at the moment, I didn’t have enough answers.

I ran through a mental list of what needed to be done before I confronted Jill with my suspicions. I had to go back to Dahl Street. I wanted to talk to Marissa Desjardin and I wanted to talk again to some of the people who’d been closest to Kellee in the Politics and the Media seminar. But the first piece in the puzzle was Val Massey’s. I picked up the phone, called Information, got the number of Masluk’s Garage and began to dial.

CHAPTER

13

There was no answer at Masluk’s Garage the first time I called, and there was no answer any of the other times I dialled the Regina Beach number that night. The next morning, before I left for the university, I made a final stab at getting in touch with Val, but I came up empty again. It was puzzling. Val’s father had struck me as the type who wouldn’t shut his business for anything short of the Second Coming.

When I got to the university, Rosalie Norman was waiting for me. Today’s knitted tam was a pretty shade of chestnut.

“That’s a nice colour on you,” I said. “It brings out your eyes.”

She looked at me suspiciously. After my performance the previous day, I could hardly blame her. “I’m sorry about yesterday,” I said. “The police had called me the night before to go downtown and identify Kellee Savage. I guess I was still pretty shaky when I came in here.”

“Next time, if you’re having personal problems, mention it,” she said.

“I will,” I promised meekly.

She handed me an envelope. “Professor Mariani asked me to give you this.”

I looked inside the envelope. It was Ed’s key to the office. “More coals upon my head,” I said.

Rosalie’s blackberry eyes were bright with interest. “Did you two have a fight? It’s never a good idea to share a work space. That’s what they told us at our ergonomics seminar.”

“I guess they were right,” I said, and my tone was so bleak that I startled myself. The sight that greeted me when I opened the door to my office didn’t improve my spirits. On my desk were a florist’s vase filled with irises and a gift beautifully wrapped in iris-covered wrapping paper. I opened the box. It was a paella pan with Barry Levitt’s recipe, and a note in Ed’s neat hand: “For Taylor and for you, with thanks and affection, E.”

I called Ed’s home to thank him, but there was no answer. I called Masluk’s Garage. No answer there, either. Apparently, it was not my day to reach out and touch someone. Just as I was hanging up, Linda Van Sickle and Jumbo arrived.

Linda’s glow had dimmed. Her face was pale and her eyes were dull. “I feel so awful,” she said. “I can’t stop thinking about Kellee. I keep replaying that evening, thinking about all the points where I could have acted differently.”

“Me too,” I said.

“There’s no use retrospecting,” Jumbo said sagely. “That’s what my coach tells us and he’s right. You’ve got to focus on what’s ahead.”

“What’s ahead doesn’t look all that terrific, either,” I said. “But you’re right. Going over what might have been is a pretty profitless exercise. Was there something special you two wanted to talk about?”

“The funeral,” Linda said flatly. “Do you know when it’s going to be? Jumbo and I think we should be there.”

“I agree,” I said. “You should be there. So should a lot of other people – Val, for instance. Have you seen him today?”

Jumbo and Linda glanced at one another quickly.

“No,” Jumbo said. “We haven’t seen Val. He wasn’t in class yesterday and he wasn’t at our eight-thirty seminar this morning.”

Linda hugged herself as if she were cold. “I’m worried about him,” she said. “The news about Kellee is going to devastate him.”

Jumbo frowned. “Well, at least he’s got nothing to feel guilty about. That night at the Owl when Kellee left, he was the only one who –”

Linda touched his arm, as if to hold him back.

Jumbo turned to her, perplexed. “Val tried to do the right thing. Why shouldn’t I talk about it?”

Linda started to respond, but I cut her off. “Jumbo, what did Val do that night?”

“When Kellee left the bar, he went after her. I guess he knew she was in no shape to be out there alone.”

“Why didn’t he stay with her?”

Jumbo shrugged. “I don’t know. I didn’t see him again that night. Neither did anybody else. He never came back.”

After Jumbo and Linda left, I went down to the library. The silent rows of books and journals were balm to my raw nerves. It was a relief to have concrete proof that ultimately all information and speculation can be catalogued neatly by the Library of Congress. By the time I got back to my office, the late-afternoon sun was pouring through my window. I put on my coat and packed up my books, then I caught sight of the telephone and decided to give Val’s number one last try.

The voice that answered was male and as wintry as a Prairie January.

“I’m trying to get in touch with Val Massey,” I said.

“He’s not here.”

“You’re not Mr. Masluk, are you?”

“I’m the neighbour.”

“Do you know when the Masluks are expected back? This really is important. I’m one of Val’s teachers at the university, and there’s something I have to talk to him about.”

“They’re at the hospital.”

“What?”

The voice was kinder now, patient in the way of someone giving road directions. “Herman had to take young Val into the General this morning. I don’t want to say any more than that. It’s not my business.”

“Is Val all right?”

“He’s gonna be, but he gave everybody a scare. Now, I think you’d better save the rest of your questions for Herman or for Val when he’s able.”

I called Regina General and asked for Val’s room number. The operator told me it was 517F – the psychiatric unit. The nurse at the charge desk told me that Val wasn’t allowed visitors yet, but that his father was putting together a short list of people who could see Val the next day.