A Colder Kind of Death (5 page)

I turned to Jill. “Is there another beer?” I asked.

“Help yourself,” Jill said, and I did.

The reporting of the trial had its own rhythm. For four days there were shots of the key players arriving at the courthouse, then courtroom sketches of the experts as they gave their testimony. Police officers, forensic specialists, pathologists, two psychiatrists. The faces of these witnesses, skilfully drawn but static, were the perfect counterpoint to the reporter’s voice droning through the endless technical details of expert testimony.

Then on the fifth day of the trial, there was real news. Kevin Tarpley had confessed he acted alone. No time now for careful sketches; just file footage of Kevin and Maureen as the news anchor’s voice, high-pitched with excitement, relayed the breaking story. Kevin had lied. It hadn’t been Maureen who used the crowbar. She had pleaded with him
not to harm Ian Kilbourn. Her fingerprints were on the crowbar because she had tried to tear it from Kevin’s hands. He was guilty; she was innocent.

The Friday before Mother’s Day, Maureen Gault walked out of the courtroom for the last time, and the cameras went wild. Maureen’s mother, a mountain of a woman who had been a media star from the moment of her daughter’s arrest, bore down on the press.

“She’s vindicated,” Shirley Gault said. “Little Mo is vindicated. What more Mother’s Day present could I ask?” Beside her, Maureen stood silent, smirking, her fair hair as insubstantial as dandelion fluff in the May sunshine. As her mother droned on about lawsuits and mental suffering and Little Mo’s good name, Maureen looked off in the distance. Finally she’d had enough. She grabbed her mother’s doughy arm, and headed down the courthouse steps. Before she got into her mother’s car, she flashed the cameras a V-for-victory sign. The screen went dark.

“And so justice was done,” I said.

Jill flicked off the console and turned on the lights. “Isn’t it always?” she said mildly.

She picked up the tapes. “I’ll leave a note with our library that you can requisition these. That way, if you want to come over some night, you can. There’s a lot of stuff you and Angus might feel more comfortable looking at on your own.”

“Like what?” Angus asked.

“Like the footage from the Heinbecker funeral, the one your father went to in Swift Current that last day.” Jill turned to me. “Charlie’s widow sent it to me last year. She’s getting on, and she wanted me to have it for our archives. I almost pitched it, then I remembered that your dad had given the eulogy, Angus. People said it was terrific.”

“I guess I’d like to hear that,” he said. “And Jill, if you have a tape of Dad’s funeral …” The sentence trailed off.
When he spoke again, his voice was small and sad. “I’d kind of like to hear what people thought about my dad.”

We went back to Jill’s office and got our coats. My son and I were silent as we walked to the parking lot. There didn’t seem to be much left to say.

Taylor wouldn’t let me throw out the pumpkin. When she saw me heading out to the alley with it Monday morning, she burst into tears. Normally she was easygoing, but the jack-o’-lantern meant a lot to her. I put it back on the picnic table. When I headed for the university the next day, I noticed that Jack’s eyeholes were beginning to pucker and his smile was drooping. Apparently, when it came to aging, pumpkins weren’t any luckier than humans.

In the park, city workers were putting snow fences around the broad, sloping lawns of the art gallery. Above me, the last of the migrating geese formed themselves into ragged V’s and headed south. Winter was coming, and I climbed the stairs to the political science department buoyed by the energy that comes with the onset of a new season.

My nerves jangled the minute I opened the door to my office. Like Miss Clavel in Taylor’s favourite book, I knew that something was not right. But, at first, it was hard to put my finger on what was wrong. My desk was as I had left it: clear except for a jar full of pencils, a notepad, and a folder of notes labelled “Populist Politics and the Saskatchewan
Election of 1982.”

It was never my favourite part of the course. At the top of the first page I had written “Why the Dowhanuik Government was Defeated.” There were three single-spaced pages of reasons, but the explanation I liked best was the one Ian gave a reporter on election night. All of the Regina candidates and campaign workers had met at the Romanian Club for the victory party. By the time the evening was over, we had lost fifty-seven of the sixty-four seats, the temperature in the hall had climbed past thirty degrees Celsius, and everybody was either drunk or trying to get there. When the reporter doing the TV remote asked my husband if he could isolate the reason for the government’s loss, Ian had looked at the man with amazement. “When you lose this badly,” he said, “it pretty much means that from the day the writ was dropped, everybody everywhere fucked up everything.”

Even with the expletives deleted, it had been a memorable sound bite. I leafed through the notes in the folder. A few pages in, I found a newspaper clipping: it was a picture of the survivors of the ’82 election: Howard Dowhanuik, Ian, Craig Evanson, Andy Boychuk, Tess Malone, Gary Stephens, and Jane O’Keefe. The premier-elect, who considered himself the consummate cracker-barrel comic, had announced that he would call them the Seven Dwarfs.

I never thought the joke was very funny, and I didn’t think what had happened to the picture on my desk was funny either. Someone had taken a felt pen and drawn X’s over the faces of my husband and Andy Boychuk. I could feel my muscles tighten. Reflexively, I took a deep breath. It was then that I noticed the smell in my office, musky and sweet: perfume, not mine.

I went back out into the hall. It was empty. I walked down to the political science office. The departmental secretary was putting mail in our boxes. Rosalie Norman was a small
and prickly woman, grudging with students and contemptuous of faculty.

“Did you let someone into my office this morning?” I asked.

She clenched her jaw and took a step towards me. “Hardly,” she said. Then, certain the balance of power had been restored, she went back to her mail.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to suggest you’d been careless. It’s just someone’s been in there, and I need to know how they got in.”

“Look in a mirror,” she said. “None of you ever remember to lock your doors.” Then, for the first time that morning she smiled. “Here,” she said, handing me an envelope. “It’s from Physical Plant. Looks like you forgot to pay a parking ticket.”

The day went downhill from there. Two students told me they were going to the department head to complain that the mid-term test was too hard, and one young woman in my senior class cornered me to tell me I was the best prof she’d ever had and could she have an extension on her essay because she’d had to go to a bridal shower the night before her paper was due. She said she knew I would understand. I didn’t.

It got worse. When I went to the Faculty Club to grab a quick sandwich for lunch, the first person I ran into was Craig Evanson’s ex-wife, Julie. The population of Regina is 180,000, and I had managed to avoid Julie for almost four years, but, as my grandmother used to say, the bad penny always turns up, and Julie Evanson was one very bad penny.

She was standing in front of a painting of flame-red gladioli that set off her silver-blond hair and her black silk suit so brilliantly that, for a moment, even I enjoyed looking at her. Age had not withered Julie, nor, as it turned out, had time staled the infinite variety of ways in which she could upset the equilibrium of anyone who crossed her path.

When she spotted me, she smiled her enchanting dimpled smile. “Jo, I hoped I’d run into you here. It saves me a trip to your office. I’m working on the Christmas fashion show the Alumni Association is putting on, and I wanted to see if I could put you down for a table.”

“I don’t think so, Julie. Those events are always a bit pricey for me. Good luck with it, though.” I started to move past her towards the dining room. She moved with me, blocking my escape.

“You’ve never concerned yourself much with fashion, have you?” she asked brightly.

“No,” I said, “I guess I always thought there were other things …”

She looked me over with the deliberation of a professional assessor. “Of course, your life has always been so full of things,” she said. Then she reached over and brushed chalk dust from the shoulder of my sweater. “I wonder why it is that some people seem to lead such messy lives? And now Kevin Tarpley’s murder. Another mess for you.”

“It’s not a mess for me, Julie. It has nothing to do with me.”

She shrugged. “I ran into a very interesting little birdy today who told me differently.”

I remembered the defaced newspaper pictures in my file. “Who were you talking to?” I asked.

When she heard the tension in my voice, Julie’s eyes lit up. “Oh, no, you don’t,” she said. “I have to protect my sources. You know about that, Joanne, now that you’re such a big TV star.” She looked at her watch. “I’ve got to fly,” she said. Then she lowered her voice. “But there is one thing I feel I really do have to tell you.”

I moved closer to her. “What?” I asked.

“You have a noticeable run in your pantyhose,” she said, and she smiled her dimpled smile and headed for the buffet.

By the time I got home, the milk of human kindness had curdled in my veins.

Taylor met me at the door. One of her braids had come undone, and her eyes were bright with conspiratorial excitement. “There’s a lady here,” she whispered. “She said she knew you from a long time ago. I let her in. Angus is upstairs, so it was okay.”

I swore under my breath. I was certain it was Julie Evanson, back for a rematch. It took every ounce of resolve I had to walk into the living room.

The woman was standing by the fireplace; in her hands was the framed photograph of Ian that I kept on the mantel. She was dressed in black: black angora pullover, elaborately beaded; black skirt, tight and very short; black hose. When she heard my step, she looked up slowly. She wasn’t disconcerted. It was as if I was the interloper.

“Hello, Joanne,” Maureen Gault said. Her voice was low and husky. “I just came back from Kevin’s memorial service, and I figured it was only right to bring you and your family a memento of this sad day.”

She put Ian’s photograph back on the mantel. “Looks like we have even more in common now,” she said.

Dumbfounded, I stared at her.

“You know, both of us widows and all,” she added helpfully. Little Mo had control of the scene, and she knew it. “I wish I’d had a portrait done of Kevin, so our son could remember his dad.”

When I didn’t respond, she shrugged, walked over to my coffee table and picked up her purse. “We couldn’t have a real funeral on account of the cops haven’t released the body. Anyway, Kevin’s mum wants to donate his remains to science for the good of mankind. Lame, eh? But I thought there wasn’t much point in waiting around.” She opened her purse and took out a funeral home program. “This has
the service on it,” she said, “and there’s a celebration of Kevin’s life. I guess all of us are a mix of bad and good. I thought your kids might want this for historical reasons. Set the record straight.”

Finally, I came up with a line. It wasn’t much. “Get out,” I said. “Get out of my house.”

She shook her head sadly. “Loss is supposed to put everybody on common ground, Joanne,” she said. “I thought you would know that by now.”

She took a compact and a lipstick out of her purse. She opened the lipstick and drew a careful mouth on top of her own thin lips.

“Cherries in the Snow,” she said. “I love this colour.” Her platinum hair had been arranged in an elaborate crown of curls. One of the curls had come loose, and she slid it back into place before she picked up her coat.

“I forgive you,” she said, and her smile, sly and knowing, was the smile of the girl who had stood triumphant on the courthouse steps the day Kevin Tarpley’s confession set her free. “My boy’s father would want me to forgive you. He found Jesus at the end. He was saved.”

“I know,” I said. “He wrote to me.” I felt the rush that comes with meanness. I thought my words would wound her, suggest that she wasn’t the sole custodian of Kevin Tarpley’s last moments on earth. But when Maureen Gault looked at me, she didn’t look wounded. She looked victorious, as if I’d just handed her exactly what she’d come to my house for.

“What did he say?” she asked lazily.

“It was a private letter,” I said.

“Suit yourself, Joanne,” she said. She dropped the memorial service program on the coffee table and started for the door. As she came parallel with me, she reached up and touched the scarf I was wearing. It was my favourite: an
antique silk, bright as a parrot. My son-in-law, Greg, had given it to me for my forty-ninth birthday.

“I like this,” she said, fingering the silk. “It just kills me how women like you always know how to wear these things. What do you do? Go to scarf school?”

She laughed at her joke and walked out of the room. I heard the front door close. She was gone, but the scent of her perfume lingered: musky and sweet. I didn’t like the smell any better than I had liked it that morning in my office.

I grabbed the program from the coffee table and headed towards the back door. Out on the deck, the air was fresh and cold. I tore the program celebrating Kevin Tarpley’s life into a dozen pieces and dropped them in the garbage. As I went back into the house, the jack-o’-lantern smirked at me from the picnic table.

When I checked the back yard the night of Howard Dowhanuik’s dinner, the pumpkin’s smirk had sagged into a leer. I thought about my daughter. She was a resolute child. In the summer one of her friends had found a kitten; every day since, Taylor had asked if she could have a cat. And now we had the pumpkin. I looked at him, plumped on the picnic table, King of the Back Yard. “I’ll bet you’ll still be here on St. Patrick’s Day, Jack,” I said.

Hilda McCourt came into the kitchen as I was knotting the scarf Greg had given me. She bent to look at its intricate swirls of colour.