The Further Investigations of Joanne Kilbourn (57 page)

We ended up in front of a collage called “Mona and the Bulls”; in it, the Mona Lisa was wearing a Chicago Bulls uniform and looking enigmatic. “I can only take so many high points, Taylor,” I said. “I think ‘Mona and the Bulls’ is going to have to be my last stop before the mural. I promise I’ll enjoy it all over again when we look at it with Alex.”

The Nanabush mural had been mounted in the resource room, and it had attracted quite a crowd. At the edge of the gathering, just as Taylor had predicted, was Alex Kequahtooway. When she spotted him, Taylor said, “There he is,” and her tone was matter-of-fact.

She went over to him and tweaked his sleeve. He knelt down and talked to her for a moment, then he stood up and started towards me.

I put my hand up to cover my face. “I had an adventure,” I said.

He reached over and took down my hand. “Marissa Desjardin left a message for me at the garage in Meadow Lake. I was on the next bus home.” Alex reached out to embrace me; then he noticed, as I had, that we were attracting more than our share of sidelong glances. He stepped back.

I moved towards him. “Alex, I really could use someone to lean on right now.”

He slid his arm around my shoulder. “Are you sure you’re all right, Jo?”

I closed my eyes and lay my head on him. “No,” I said,
“but for the first time since all of this happened, I think maybe I’m going to be.”

It rained the morning of Kellee Savage’s funeral, but by the time Jill and I were on the highway, the sky was clear and the sun was shining. Alex had offered to drive to Indian Head with me, but Jill had been anxious to go. “It’s the least I can do for another journalist,” she said simply.

The United Church was full, but the only people I recognized were Neil McCallum and Kellee’s classmates from the J school. There were flowers everywhere. Ed Mariani, who’d come back from Minneapolis with a terrible cold and Barry’s forgiveness, had sent the white roses that were on the table with the guest book, and the air of the church was sweet with the perfume of spring. The service had the special poignancy that the funeral of a young person always has. There were too many young faces in the pews, and the minister had the good sense to admit that the reasons for the death of a person who has just begun life were always as much a mystery to him as they were to any of us.

Afterwards, the congregation was invited down to the church hall for lunch. It was a pretty room: warm with pastel tablecloths and bowls of pussy willows splashed with afternoon light. Neil McCallum was surrounded by people, so I went over to the table where Linda Van Sickle and Jumbo Hryniuk were sitting. When he saw me, Jumbo leaped up and helped me with my chair.

“This is the first funeral I’ve ever been to,” he said. “I almost lost it up there. Do they get any easier?”

“No,” I said. “They don’t. But I’m glad you’re here.” I turned to Linda Van Sickle. “I’m glad you came, too. I never had a chance to ask you the results of that ultrasound you had.”

“I’m going to have twins,” she said. “Two little boys.”

“That must be so exciting,” I said.

“It is,” she agreed, but her voice was flat. Physically, Linda looked better than she had the last time I’d seen her, but she’d lost the serenity that had enveloped her during so much of her pregnancy. When she spoke again, I could hear the strain in her voice. “Is it true about Tom Kelsoe? That he killed Kellee and Professor Gallagher?”

“It’s true,” I said.

“The worst part,” Jumbo said, “was the way he dumped Kellee in that field – just like she was an animal.”

“Less than an animal,” I said.

Linda chewed her lower lip. “What’s going to happen to Val?” she asked.

“He’s still in the hospital,” I said. “I guess the first thing he’s going to have to do is come to terms with what happened. His dad has a lawyer working on the legal questions.”

Jumbo looked puzzled. “Val always thought his dad hated him.”

“Val was wrong about a lot of things,” I said.

Linda shook her head sadly. “I guess we all were.”

I looked across the room. Neil McCallum was motioning to me to come over. I stood up, shook hands with Jumbo and gave Linda a hug. “There’s someone over there I want to talk to,” I said. “I’ll see you in class on Friday.”

Neil’s eyes were red-rimmed and swollen, but he smiled when he saw me.

“How are you doing?” I asked.

“Not very good,” he said. “I miss Kellee. I hate wearing a suit, but Mum says you have to for a funeral.”

“Your mum’s right.”

“I know,” he said. Then he brightened. “Are you ready to go?”

“Go where?” I asked.

“To see the crocuses,” he said. “Don’t you remember? When I told you Chloe and I saw the crocuses, you said you wanted to see them.” He held out his hand to me. “So let’s go.”

I followed Neil outside, and we walked down the street to his house to get Chloe. As we headed for the edge of town, the dog bounded across the lawns and ran through every puddle on the street. When we hit the prairie, and started towards the hill where Neil had seen the crocuses, a breeze came up and I could smell moisture and warming earth. Neil and Chloe ran up the hill ahead of me.

Suddenly he yelled, “Here they are.”

I followed him to the top of the hill and looked around me. For as far as I could see, the ground was purple and white. It was an amazing sight.

Neil bent down, picked a crocus and handed it to me. “They’re nice, aren’t they?” he said.

“They’re beautiful,” I said. “There’s a story about where crocuses came from.”

Neil sat down on the ground and began to take the burrs out of Chloe’s coat. “Do you want to tell it?”

I sat down beside him. “Yes, I think I do,” I said. “It’s about a woman named Demeter who had a daughter named Persephone.”

Chloe yelped, and Neil leaned over to reassure her.

“Persephone was a wonderful daughter,” I continued. “Very sweet and thoughtful. Her mother loved her a lot. One day Persephone decided she had to go to the underworld to comfort the spirits of the people who had died.”

“Like Kellee,” Neil said.

“Yes,” I said. “Like Kellee. But in the story, once Persephone was gone, her mother missed her so much that she decided that nothing would ever grow again.” Chloe leaned over and put her muddy head on my lap.

“She likes you,” Neil said.

“I like her too,” I said. “Anyway, one morning when Demeter was missing Persephone so much she thought she herself might die, a ring of purple crocuses pushed their way through the soil. The flowers were all around her, and they were so beautiful Demeter knelt down on the earth so she could see them up close. Guess what she heard?”

Neil shrugged.

“She heard the crocuses whispering, ‘Persephone returns! Persephone returns!’ Demeter was so happy she began to dance, and she made a cape out of white crocuses to give to her daughter when she came back from comforting the spirits of the dead.”

Neil lay down on the ground. For a while he just lay there, looking up at the sky with Chloe panting beside him. Finally, he turned to me and smiled. “I heard them,” he said. “I heard the crocuses whisper.”

Verdict in Blood

CHAPTER

1

When the phone on my bedside table shrilled in the early hours of Labour Day morning, I had the receiver pressed to my ear before the second ring. Eli Kequahtooway, the sixteen-year-old nephew of the man in my life, had been missing since 4:00 the previous afternoon. It wasn’t the first time that Eli had taken off, but the fact that he’d disappeared before didn’t ease my mind about the dangers waiting for him in a world that didn’t welcome runaways, especially if they were aboriginal.

I was braced for the worst. I got it, but not from the quarter I was expecting.

My caller’s voice was baritone rubbed by sandpaper. “This is Detective Robert Hallam of the Regina City Police,” he said. “Am I speaking to Hilda McCourt?”

“No,” I said. “I’m Joanne Kilbourn. Miss McCourt is staying with me for the weekend, but I’m sure she’s asleep by now. Can’t this wait until morning?”

Detective Hallam made no attempt to disguise his frustration. “Ms. Kilbourn, this is not a casual call. If I’d wanted to recruit a block captain for Neighbourhood Watch, I would
have waited. Unfortunately for all of us, a woman’s been murdered, and your friend seems to be our best bet for establishing the victim’s identity. Now, why don’t you do the sensible thing and bring Ms. McCourt to the phone. Then I can get the information I need, and you can go back to bed.”

Hilda was eighty-three years old. I shrank from the prospect of waking her up to deal with a tragedy, but as I walked down the hall to the guest room, I could see the light under her door. When I knocked, she answered immediately. Even propped up in bed reading, Hilda was a striking figure. When the actress Claudette Colbert died, a graceful obituary noted that, among her many talents, Claudette Colbert wore pyjamas well. Hilda McCourt shared that gift. The pyjamas she was wearing were black silk, tailored in the clean masculine lines of women’s fashions in the forties. With her brilliant auburn hair exploding like an aureole against the pillow behind her, there was no denying that, like Claudette Colbert, Hilda McCourt radiated star power.

She leaned forward. “I heard the phone,” she said.

“It’s for you, Hilda,” I said. “It’s the police. They need your help.” I picked up her robe from the chair beside the window and held it out to her. “You can take the call in my room.”

She slipped into her robe, a magnificent Chinese red silk shot through with gold, and straightened her shoulders. “Thank you, Joanne,” she said. “I’ll enlighten you when I’m enlightened.”

After she left, I picked up the book she’d been reading.
Geriatric Psychiatry: A Handbook
. It was an uncharacteristic choice. Hilda was a realist about her age. She quoted Thomas Dekker approvingly, “Age is like love; it cannot be hid,” but she never dwelled on growing old, and her mind was as sharp as her spirit was indomitable. While I waited
for her, I glanced at the book’s table of contents. The topics were weighty: “The Dementias”; “Delirium and Other Organic Mental Disorders”; “Psychoses”; “Anxiety and Related Personality Dysfunctions”; “Diagnosing Depression.” Uneasy, I leafed through the book. Its pages were heavily annotated in a strong but erratic hand which I was relieved to see was not my old friend’s. The writer had entered into a kind of running dialogue with the authors of the text, but the entries were personal, not scholarly. I stopped at a page listing the criteria for a diagnosis of dementia. The margins were black with what appeared to be self-assessments. I felt a pang of guilt as sharp as if I’d happened upon a stranger’s diary.

Hilda wasn’t gone long. When she came back, she pulled her robe around her as if she were cold and sank onto the edge of the bed.

“Let me get you some tea,” I said.

“Tea’s a good idea, but we’d better use the large pot,” she said. “The detective I was speaking to is coming over.”

“Hilda, what’s going on?”

She adjusted the dragon’s-head fastening at the neck of her gown. “The police were patrolling Wascana Park tonight, and they found a body sprawled over one of those limestone slabs at the Boy Scout memorial. There was nothing on the victim to identify her, but there was a slip of paper in her jacket pocket.” Hilda’s face was grim. “Joanne, the paper had my name on it and your telephone number.”

“Then you know who she is,” I said.

Hilda nodded. “I’m afraid I do,” she said. “I think it must be Justine Blackwell.”

“The judge,” I said. “But you were just at her party tonight.”

“I was,” Hilda said, stroking the dragon’s head thoughtfully. “That book you’re holding belongs to her. There’d
been some disturbing developments in her life, and she wanted my opinion on them. I left your number with her because she was going to call me later today.”

“Come downstairs, and we’ll have that tea,” I said.

“I’d like to dress first,” Hilda said. “I wouldn’t be comfortable receiving a member of the police force in my robe.”

I’d just plugged in the kettle when the phone rang again. It was Alex Kequahtooway. “Jo, I know it’s late, but you said to call as soon as I heard from Eli.”

“He called you?”

“He’s back. He was here when I got home.”

“Oh, Alex, I’m so glad. Is he okay?”

“I don’t know. When I walked in, he’d just got out of the shower. He went into his room and started taking fresh clothes out of his drawers. Jo, he didn’t say a word to me. It was as if I wasn’t there. At first, I thought he was on something, but I’ve seen kids wasted on just about every substance there is, and this is different.”

“Have you called Dr. Rayner?”

“I tried her earlier in the evening. I thought Eli might have got in touch with her, but there was no answer. Of course, it’s a holiday weekend. I’m going to call again, but if I don’t connect, I’m going to take Eli down to emergency. I hate to bring in another shrink, but I just don’t know what to do for him, and I don’t want to blow it.”

“You won’t,” I said. “Eli’s going to be fine. He’s come a long way this summer. Most importantly, he has you.”

“And you think that’s enough?” Alex asked, and I could hear the ache.

“I know that’s enough.”

For a beat there was silence, then Alex, who was suspicious of words, said what he didn’t often say. “I love you, Jo.”

“I love you, too.” I took a breath. “Alex, there’s something else. About ten minutes ago, Hilda got a phone call from a
colleague of yours. There was a murder in the park tonight. It looks like the victim was Hilda’s friend Justine Blackwell. I’m afraid Detective Hallam – that’s the officer who’s coming over – is going to ask Hilda to identify the body. I don’t want her to have to go through that.”

“She shouldn’t have to,” Alex said. “There are a hundred people in this city who know Justice Blackwell. Someone else can make the I
D –
I’ll take care of it. And, Jo, pass along a message to Hilda for me, would you? Tell her not to let Bob Hallam get under her skin. He can be a real jerk.”