Deadly Appearances (18 page)

“You sound beleaguered.”

“I am beleaguered. This place is steaming. Record temperatures for October in case you haven’t heard, and the humidity is unbelievable. Between the weather and rumours about an election call, people are foaming at the mouth. God, Jo, why do we ever get involved with this stuff? Somewhere civilized people are listening to Ravel string quartets and talking about Proust, and here I am driving all over this town in the heat chasing down some halfwit whose brother-in-law knows somebody who works for an ad agency who says the government has block-booked media time for October and November and the writ will be dropped any minute. God, everybody’s gone nuts. The politicians are foaming waiting for the
PM
to call on the governor general, and we’re foaming waiting for something, anything, to happen so we’ll finally have a story. Sorry, Jo – referential mania, the Ottawa disease. And oh, God, it
is
hot here. How’re things with you? How’s the project?”

“Good. I’m cool and organized – sitting in the granny flat with the air conditioner humming quietly and a shelf full of virginal vertical files, a box of fresh paper and a jar of sharp pencils, ready to begin –”

“No word processor, no personal computer – Jo, who would have suspected you were a dinosaur?”

“Anyone who ever saw me dealing with a device that had more than two moving parts. Anyway, dinosaur or not, I think I’m making some headway. Dave Micklejohn told me some stuff that suggests a definite connection between Andy and Lane Appleby – the mystery woman in that picture of Andy’s body being put into the ambulance after he was … well you know, after … Howard says the Applebys have been smoothing Andy’s financial path since he was in university, and that seems to be a giant lead to me. I called Winnipeg tonight and Lane Appleby has agreed to see me over the Thanksgiving weekend.”

“Thanksgiving? Joanne, that’s forever.”

“Only for Americans. This is Canada, remember? We have to give thanks before everything freezes on the vine. It’s a week from Monday, my friend – October tenth. Life is just moving too quickly for us, I guess. Anyway, between now and then I’m going to see what I can dig up on the Appleby-Boychuk connection. I want to be able to ask the right questions. I’m going to see Eve tomorrow.”

His voice was laconic. “How’s she doing?”

“Well, to be honest, she sounded a bit out of it on the phone, but even at the best of times, Eve tends to be unfocused.”

“And, of course, these are not the best of times.”

“No, they most assuredly are not. Not for anyone, I guess. I had a phone call from Soren Eames tonight. Remember him? The mystery pastor? Anyway, he was just about abject when I agreed to go out and see him. I wonder why.”

“What’s he like, Joanne? What’s your sense of him?”

“Well, the only times I’ve seen him he’s been terribly upset. I can’t be sure, but I think I saw him for a moment near the ambulance that day at the picnic. He took care of Roma after the ambulance left. Then I saw him in his office at Wolf River the next day. And I talked to him briefly at the reception after the funeral. Emotion-charged times, but even then he was pretty riveting.”

“Pretty what? I didn’t hear your adjective, Joanne.”

“Riveting. He had presence – the kind of person you can feel in a room. He’s gorgeous, you know. He looks like James Taylor, the singer – very tall and dark and slim. And he has a sense of drama. He dresses all in black. He’s a man you would notice – very sexual.”

There was silence at the other end, and I wondered if we’d been cut off.

“Rick, are you there?”

“Yes. I’m here. Sorry … Look, I’d better go. I’ll call you tomorrow night.” His voice was strained, and I found myself smiling when I thought about the reason for his sudden awkwardness. Jealousy – I had gone on too long and too enthusiastically about Soren Eames. Tall, dark, slim, riveting, gorgeous – I had, as we used to say in high school, laid it on with a trowel, and Rick didn’t like it because – and I grew warm with the thought – because he was interested in me.

It had been so long since I’d been romantically involved with a man that I’d forgotten the vanities and the vulnerability.

“Rick, it’ll be good to talk to you again tomorrow – any time, it’s always good.”

“Good night, Joanne, and thanks.” The connection was broken, and I was alone in the granny flat remembering the interest in Rick’s voice, smiling …

As I drove along the Trans-Canada to Wolf River I tried to remember the second line of “To Autumn.” “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” and then something about the maturing sun.

I looked at the scorched fields and the stunted crops – there wouldn’t be many farmers in our province reciting odes to the maturing sun this fall. It had rained on and off for a week after Andy’s funeral, but the earth had sucked up the moisture without a trace. The rain had come late and the land had been dry. Still, Keats could have made a poem of this morning – brilliant sun, the sky lifting big and blue against the land. It was, I reminded myself as I drove slowly and safely off the Belle Plaine overpass, a good day to be alive.

It was just after nine o’clock when I drove down the lane beside Eve’s house and parked in front of the little building she used for her pottery. The neat three-bedroom bungalow that had been the unhappy home of Eve and Andy Boychuk was, I noticed as I drove by, immaculate: the storm windows gleamed hard in the sunlight, the shrubs by the house were wrapped in sackcloth, and the flower beds had been turned over. It was the house of a person who set deadlines and kept them. Eve’s studio was a different story. The grass outside was uncut and yellowing, and there was pottery everywhere. Pots and vases covered makeshift trestle tables, and a family of cats stalked each other around bowls and plants stacked in the dying grass. Even to my untrained eyes, all these unsold, unsalable pieces spoke of pathology.

As I stood squinting into the sun, Eve came from a lean- to at the back of the pottery. She looked tense but handsome. Her long grey hair was parted in the middle and fell in heavy braids over her shoulders. Her feet were bare, and she was wearing blue jeans and a denim work shirt so faded they were almost white. She was carrying two blocks of fresh clay wrapped in clean heavy plastic that was looped and tied to make a handle.

The sleeves of her shirt were rolled back, and you could see the muscles of her arms taut with the weight of the clay. She dropped the clay blocks in front of me.

“Jo, carry these inside, would you? I need to get a couple more.” I slid my hands through the plastic loops and lifted. The clay didn’t move a centimetre, but I could feel my vertebrae creak. Tomorrow I would be forty-six. I didn’t plan to celebrate the day in traction.

I left the clay on the ground in front of me. “Sorry, Eve – I’ll hold the door for you, but that’s my limit.”

“Oh, Jo. Those things can’t weigh more than forty pounds apiece.” She slipped her hands through the loops and carried them easily into her workroom. I followed behind her like a puppy.

Eve’s studio was a surprisingly pleasant and functional place. It was square, high-ceilinged and cool. There were windows all around, but set high on the wall. The autumn light poured in through them and turned the dusty air of the studio to a yellowy haze. Beneath the windows were shelves filled with pottery that was finished but unfired. In the centre of the room there were two slab worktables and a potter’s wheel. Along one wall was a long table filled with stuff: plastic bleach bottles cut back to hold sponges, gallon ice cream buckets full of cutting tools and garlic presses and other odds and ends that could press decorations into wet clay. In the corner were a hot plate and an old-fashioned sink.

Eve bent and picked up clay from the potter’s wheel – small pieces that hadn’t worked out. “It’s called reclaiming,” she said, but I noticed when she began to wedge the clay that her hands, always so capable, were shaking. “Damn,” she said, “sorry, Jo, I’m not good for much today.”

“Is there anything I can do to help?”

“No, same old thing,” she said vaguely. “Unless … Jo, there’s a little exercise I do that sometimes brings me down. Do it with me.”

I was uneasy. Eve was always quick to sense the moods of others. “Are you worried playing with the loony will make you loony, too? No permanent damage, I guarantee. Come on, Jo, it might even do you some good.”

She rummaged around in a box of tapes and with a swift and decisive movement ejected the Hindemith that had been playing when we walked in and replaced it with something that sounded like relaxation music from the dentist’s office – waves pounding and a flute. She pulled two chairs side by side and said, “Now just sit and listen. Try to close everything out but the music and my voice.

“Take a deep, cleansing breath – good – now let your hands rest in your lap. Feel the air around them.”

On the tape the waves pounded and a seagull squawked. “Close your eyes … Think of all the hands you have known.” (Above the waves, the flute notes rose sweet and sad. In the Old Testament the flute is the instrument of death.) “The hands you will never forget … your father’s hands … your mother’s hands … your grandmother’s hands.” (Ian’s hands warm in mine that first night … Mieka’s baby hand curled around my finger … Peter’s hand surprisingly strong when he gripped my hand and led me up the aisle of St. Anselm’s for his father’s funeral.) “Now think of your hand … Think of all the things your hand has done … Think of how it learned to lift a spoon … grasp a pencil … tie a shoelace … all the tasks your hand has done.” (No flutes now, just the sound of whales singing.) “Working, playing, loving.

“Touch my hand now, Jo.” (Her hands are large, strong, the fingertips rough with dried clay.) “Hands are the reaching out of the heart … Experience my hand. Grasp it tight … now release it … The touch is gone, but the imprint will be there forever.” (Seagulls, flutes, the whales singing their death song.) “Forever and ever in your heart.”

And we sat in silence, side by side, until the tape was over. Eve looked serene, one hand cupped in the other, palms up, in her lap, her chest rising and falling evenly, her eyes half closed. I was embarrassed. I never seemed to be able to get into these things the way other people could. In the sixties, I was never very good with dope – the magical mystery tour always seemed to leave without me. But the exercise had transformed Eve. When she turned to me her face was wiped clean of pain but her green eyes seemed slightly unfocused, and I wondered, not for the first time, how much dope she had done when she was young. When she spoke, her voice was light and dreamy. “You know, I am so filled with peace that I think I could sleep now if you wouldn’t mind … Or was there something special …?”

I felt ridiculous, Nancy Drew meets Timothy Leary – but I’d played her game. She owed me at least a turn at mine. “Just one question, Eve. Do you know a woman named Lane Appleby?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Eve, you must remember her. She was the one who …” I looked at Eve’s face. She was almost serene. I couldn’t finish. I couldn’t throw those shattering words against the fragile peace she’d drawn around her – the one who walked with us to carry Andy’s body to the ambulance, the one who stood motionless when your mother-in-law spat in her face, the one who endowed the chapel they wheel your vegetable son into every day of his dim and shapeless life.

“The one who what, Jo?”

I put my arm around her shoulders. “Nothing, Eve. Come on, let me walk you up to the house.”

As I followed Eve into her shining, empty house, I thought of all the questions I hadn’t asked. But one question at least had been answered. I couldn’t prove it in a court of law, and Inspector Millar Millard would not applaud the process by which I had arrived at my conclusion, but I was certain that Eve Boychuk had not killed her husband.

CHAPTER

13

I had told Soren Eames I’d see him early in the afternoon. When I left Eve, it was 10:15 and the morning yawned emptily ahead of me – not enough time to drive to the city, but too much to waste hanging around the Charlie Appleby Prayer Centre.

I decided I’d drive over to Wolf River Bible College and see if I could find Lori and Mark Evanson. Eve had worried me. The meditation or whatever it was had helped temporarily, but no relaxation technique in the world was a match for Eve’s demons. Lori and Mark would, I knew, keep an eye on Eve if I asked them. They were limited kids, but they were decent and reliable. Most important, because of Mark’s connection with Carey Boychuk, they saw Eve regularly. She would not feel violated by their concern.

When I drove through the main gate of the college, I felt like I’d driven into an old Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer musical. The students were back. They were everywhere and, by some people’s criteria, they were an appealing bunch: boys with razor-cut hair and button-down shirts and vivid corduroy pants, girls with shining hair and careful makeup and skirts and sweaters the colours of autumn. Perfect … and yet on this sultry October day, their perfection was jarring. They had the bright, unreal look of a casting director’s idea of students. There was, I remembered, a dress code at Wolf River, but this studied perfection went beyond that. I thought of my own students in their jeans or cutoffs or cords or dashikis, and of their hair, spiked or crewcut or frizzed or bleached or removed entirely, but all of them fumbling, however awkwardly, with an identity. Peter has a phrase that is both final and withering. “He looks as if his mother dressed him.” The kids at the Bible college looked as if their mothers dressed them. It was kind of sad.

Lori Evanson wasn’t hard to track down. I asked one of the perfect boys to direct me and, with a flash of flawless teeth, he did. Lori, he told me, had a new job. She was helping people “get orientated,” and she was working out of the
CAP
Centre. I looked blank. He smiled and said carefully, “The Charlie Appleby Prayer Centre.” Poor Charlie – all that endowment money and he ended up as the first two-thirds of an acronym.

She was in the central reception area, sitting at a table piled high with student handbooks. On her desk was a sign, “Please Disturb Me,” and there was a picture of a cartoon turtle with a grin on his face and a happy-face button on his shell.