Deadly Appearances (30 page)

Twitching and double vision. I had begun to have difficulty reading. The first time it happened I’d been reading some photocopies of old newspapers. The print was small and pale, so when my vision blurred, I wrote it off to eye-strain. I was still doing that, still looking for a reasonable excuse, still searching out a logical explanation for my symptoms, but the careful list of symptoms in my daybook was defining a profile that couldn’t be ignored. I was either sick or crazy. I was also terrified.

I said that sickness and fear were the two constants of my life. There was a third – Rick Spenser. Every night, wherever he was, he would call, and we would talk. We had gone beyond the Andy book, he and I. In fact, he rarely mentioned the book any more. He was more interested in me and in my days. What was I doing? Who had I seen? How did I feel? I am not a vain woman but with every call it became increasingly clear that Rick Spenser was as attracted to me as powerfully as I was to him.

Sometimes late in the evening when I sat in front of the television and saw his face, round and clever and knowing, my heart would pound and, sitting in my old jogging pants and sweatshirt, I would feel like a fool: a forty-six-year-old housewife watching her heartthrob, a newsroom groupie, but ten minutes later the phone would ring and it would be him. How was I? What was I up to? Who had I been talking to? And, always, had I seen him on the news? How had he done? Had he been clear, witty, insightful?

This Rick Spenser, the vulnerable man behind the persona, touched something in me. Often when I would hang up the phone, I would feel as intimately connected to him as I would have if we’d made love. And so Rick became the third constant in my life, one of the few fixed stars that lit up the darkness of those early winter weeks. And that was the pattern until Remembrance Day.

The call came early on the morning of November eleventh. It couldn’t have been much past six. It was Craig Evanson, sounding strained to the point of breaking. The correctional centre had called him a few minutes before. Somehow in the night Eve had gotten hold of a surgical knife and slashed her wrists. The morning nurse had found her. Crafty Eve had been lying with her blanket pulled up to her chin, innocent as a sleeping child. But the nurse noticed a stain in the middle of the blanket and, when she bent to look at it more closely, she saw that the stain was spreading. She pulled back the blanket, and there was Eve, covered in blood, still clutching the knife and near death. Eve was alive, and she was in the hospital wing of the correctional centre.

That whole morning had a dreamlike, surreal quality. It was still dark, and light snow was falling on the empty streets. The stores and office buildings were lit, but when we pulled onto the Ring Road, there wasn’t another car in sight.

“Do you have the feeling we’re the last two people left on earth?” Craig asked.

His voice came from a place I didn’t ever want to go, and his words made my heart pound. There didn’t seem to be much logic left in the universe. I would not have been surprised if I had turned in my seat and found that Craig had vanished, just as I would not have been surprised to go home and see a charred and smoking ruin where twenty minutes before my home and children had been. I didn’t answer him. I didn’t trust my voice.

The process of being admitted to the correctional centre was, by now, grimly routine. We drove up to the gate and waited as the harsh orange security lights swept the exercise yard and shone into our faces, leaching them of colour, turning them into death masks. The guard, enveloped in a yellow slicker, checked our names against a list, and somewhere somebody activated something that opened the electric gates.

Inside it was the familiar rite of passage: doors unlocking to reveal other locked doors, which opened to reveal still more locked doors. A Chinese puzzle.

The guard took us through double doors at the end of Eve’s old ward. As we passed Eve’s old bed, I noticed that the mattress was gone, and just the bare frame of the bed was left.

“That’ll teach her,” I said aloud, and Craig looked at me sharply. Eve was in a small room lit by a powerful overhead light. “Does the light have to shine right into her face that way?” I asked.

The nurse who was standing at the head of Eve’s bed stopped writing on his clipboard and gave me a warm and surprisingly human smile. He was wearing a poppy, too.

“It’s regulations, but they don’t notice it or, if they do, they don’t mind. Some of them, afterward, even convert. They remember the light of heaven shining down upon them.”

Eve looked past caring. She was hooked to tubes that put things into her and took things out of her, and she was connected to machines that measured the beat of her life. Something out of a sci-fi movie – “The Mechanical Woman – only her face is human.”

Human, but not Eve. Not gallant Eve who tried to transcend cruelty and betrayal and death with crystals and colour therapy and a cleansing diet. Poor, poor Eve.

Her wrists were heavily bandaged. I reached down and carefully took her hand and held it between my own, warming it. (“Think of all the hands you have known. Your father’s hands … your mother’s hands … Experience my hand. Grasp it tight … now release it. The touch is gone, but the imprint will be there forever. Forever and ever in your heart.”)

After a while, I felt Craig Evanson touch my shoulder. “I think it’s time to go, Joanne.” Then he took my hand from Eve’s, but he didn’t let go.

When the guard came to lead us out of the prison, Craig Evanson and I followed him, hand in hand, like children in a fairy-tale.

CHAPTER

20

“Double solitaire,” I said.

Craig turned the key in the ignition and looked at me.

“Double solitaire. The last time Eve and I were together that’s what we played.” My legs began to tremble. “Oh, God, Craig, when is this going to end?”

He reached over and gave me an awkward hug. “I don’t know, Jo. I just don’t know.”

We sat for a while, isolated, thinking our own thoughts. It began to snow, and the banks of orange security lights turned the snow orange.

Finally, Craig said, “I don’t know about you, but I need a drink.”

I looked at the clock on the dashboard. “Craig, it’s not even nine o’clock yet.”

“Fine,” he said absently as he backed out of the parking spot, “we’ll go to the Dewdney Club. I’ve belonged to that place for twenty years. If they can’t find me a bottle of whisky on a holiday morning, I’ll break every window in the place.”

I looked at him in amazement. “Whatever you say, Craig.”

After the harsh realities of the correctional centre, the elegance of the Dewdney Club seemed like another dimension. There was a fire in the fireplace and in the background, discreetly, Glenn Gould played Bach. Craig led me to a table for two by the fire, took my coat, then disappeared. When he came back he was carrying a bottle of Seagram’s, and a waiter was dancing around him trying to intercept him.

“Mr. Evanson, I’m certain I can make you a drink you’ll find quite palatable.”

“I find this palatable, Tony,” said Craig, brandishing the bottle.

The breakfast on the sideboard was the kind you see only in magazines and men’s clubs: grapefruit halves sectioned and dusted with brown sugar; silver chafing dishes of sausage and bacon and kippers; hash browns and toast and oatmeal kept warm in warming trays; eggs scrambled fresh in a copper pan.

“Do you want food, Jo?” Craig asked.

“Maybe some coffee to put the rye in.”

Craig laughed, but there was no fun in the laughter.

“A lady doesn’t drink liquor before noon. That’s what” – a flash of pain crossed his face – “that’s what the lady in my life always says.”

I thought of Julie, guilty of God knows what, but not a lady to drink before noon. I sipped my coffee. The rye was smooth, and it felt good to be by the fire, but I couldn’t get warm.

Across from me, Craig had filled his water glass with whisky. He raised it. “To you, Jo. A good person.”

I lifted my cup, to return the toast.

“No, don’t,” he said, holding up his hand to stop my toast. “At the moment, I would welcome a lightning bolt to blast me and mine out of existence.”

When I spoke, my voice sounded unused and rusty. “You didn’t make the phone call that morning, Craig.”

“I might as well have. She did it for me.” He drained the glass. His voice broke. “Sweet Christ, she did it for me.”

The ambiguity hung in the air. She did what for him? The phone call? Or something unspeakably worse? I felt a spasm in my bowels.

“Craig, I’m sick. I need to go home.”

He didn’t seem to hear me. “I found out by accident, you know. I found out this morning. When the correctional centre phoned the house, it was Lori who answered. Julie’s gone to her mother’s for the long weekend – said she was exhausted from everything she was doing for me.” He laughed his new hollow laugh. “Everything – that covers a multitude of sins, doesn’t it?” He looked at the bottle speculatively, but he didn’t touch it.

“Anyway, I thought with Julie away it was a good time for Mark and his family to come home. Lori answered the phone. I was still sleeping. The clerk at the correctional centre didn’t ask if the Mrs. Evanson he was talking to was my wife. Lori was hysterical when she heard about Eve. Jo, you know how sweet she is, but she’s a very limited girl, and she has that fundamentalist guilt to deal with. She’s taking all this on her shoulders. She told me the sequence of events before Soren Eames’s body was discovered – including” – he looked at his knees – “including that abysmal phone call from Julie about her anonymous caller. If,” he said softly, “there was an anonymous caller.”

I felt a cold sweat breaking out on my skin, and my heart began to race. “Craig, could I go home now – please?”

“Right, Jo, of course.” He went to the cloakroom and came back with my coat.

We drove up Albert Street in silence. As we came to the bridge across the creek, the air was filled with the sound of gunfire. Terrible, pounding shots that made my head hurt and the marrow in my bones ache. One upon another they came – shots fired across the creek from cannons pulled into position in front of the legislature, shots to mark the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. Remembrance Day, the day they turned the swords into ploughshares.

Craig walked me to the door of my house. I didn’t ask him in. As I started to go, he put his hand on my arm and turned me so he could see my face.

“Joanne, are you okay?”

I looked at him. The tall, floppy man shivering in the thin November snow, his future shadowed, the delicate fabric of his marriage ripped apart, his wife guilty of unknown cruelties and crimes in the name of love.

“Nope. I’m not okay, Craig, and you’re not okay. And Eve’s not okay, and Julie’s not okay. Okay is a concept gone from the universe.” I felt hysteria rising in my throat. “I’m sorry, Craig.”

As soon as I closed the front door I began to shudder, and my mouth filled with saliva.

In the hall mirror I saw my face, yellow and covered with a sheen of sweat. I could feel my heart beating in my chest. It was the worst attack yet. I bent double and closed my eyes. Worried, the dogs began to nuzzle me and lick my face. I pushed them away. Upstairs, the boys were yelling. I didn’t even take my coat off. I walked out the back door and went across the yard to the granny flat.

I had to hold onto the rail to pull myself up the stairs. When I opened the door, the phone was ringing. It was Rick. A report about Eve’s suicide attempt had come to the newsroom. When I started to tell him about what had happened that morning, my voice was jagged, shrill.

“Rick, we’ve got to do something. There are things you don’t know. Someone’s doing this to her. She’s innocent. I know it.” Then I broke down completely. I couldn’t go on.

Rick’s voice was calm, almost professionally reassuring. He sounded like a social worker on the business end of a suicide hot line. “Joanne, where are you now?”

“The granny flat. I couldn’t face the boys. I’d rather they think I don’t care about them than let them see me like this again.”

“Stay where you are. Just curl up on that absurd hide-abed thing you stuck me on and spend a weekend in bed, away from the noise of the house and the boys.”

“But Rick, we have to save Eve. She’s innocent. Someone is doing this to her. Someone has driven her to this.”

When he answered me there was a new tone in his voice, something unpleasant and patronizing. “Joanne, listen carefully. There is no ‘someone.’ Eve drove herself to suicide just as she drove herself to murder. There’s a pattern there, a history. You know that yourself. The police have the right person. Now just rest.”

“You think I’m crazy.” My voice was shrewish, accusing.

He sounded exasperated. “I think you’ve been through a great deal.”

“And cracked under the strain. I have a history, too, don’t forget. Well, I’m not crazy. Someone is out to get Eve. I know it.”

“No one said you had cracked. The consensus of the doctors seems to be that you’re exhausted. Nobody could fault you for that.”

“I don’t need you telling me I’m crazy. Now listen, Rick.” I heard my voice, triumphant, crazy. “I’m pulling the jack for this phone right out of the wall. Now try to get to me.” Then I was alone in the empty room, a room so quiet I could hear my heartbeat.

I don’t know how long I sat there, shaking and exhausted. A queer phrase kept floating through my mind. “You’ve got to get your bearings.” But bearings had to do with navigation when you were lost, and I wasn’t lost. I was safe in my granny flat. “A room of one’s own,” Virginia Woolf had said. Well, this room was my own. Joanne Kilbourn’s room. The walls were lined with pictures of my dead husband and the floor was littered with cartons and files that contained the record in words and pictures of the life of my dead friend, Andy Boychuk. My daughter had crocheted the bright afghan on the bed the summer she’d broken her leg. On the desk, dusty now but still heartbreakingly beautiful, was the crystal pitcher Rick had given me. It was filled with branches of Russian olive I’d cut by the creek. The olive berries were pale in the grey half light of November.