Deadly Appearances (20 page)

Finding material was easy. The Caucus Office had boxes of stuff and already the files on Andy’s political years were bulging. So when I opened the envelope and a fat package marked “Eve Lorscott Boychuk: Family,” slid out, I eyed the 1963 file speculatively.

There was a half-inch-thick stack of clippings on Tudor Lorscott. I scanned them quickly. The usual corporate publicity: head shots of Eve’s father looking pleased to be appointed to the board of some company or to be heading up a charity drive. There were notices of business acquisitions by Lorscott Limited – some solid, unspectacular stuff, but a surprising number of gold and nickel mines. Old Tudor was a high roller. And then – bonanza – a feature article from the old
Star Weekly
: “The Lorscott Case – The Family Behind the Headlines.” There was not much information beyond what Howard Dowhanuik had told me that night a thousand years ago in Saskatoon, but there was a haunting picture taken, the
Weekly
article noted, greedily licking its chops, less than a week before the murder attempt. It was a colour photo, taken in the living room of the family home in Port Durham – a lovely room, all lemon yellow and ivory, with a glowing abstract over the fireplace and a graceful bowl of iris and tulips and yellow anemone on the glass coffee table. In the forefront of the picture the three Lorscott women sit on a silk-covered love seat behind the coffee table and the spring flowers. Madeline Lorscott, as old as Eve is now, a little heavy in middle age, dark-haired still, worried-looking, is flanked by her daughters, slim young women in smooth, sleeveless A-line dresses with matching pumps, Eve’s dress cornflower blue, Nancy’s mint green. Their dark hair, like their mother’s, is fluffed into bouffants that flip girlishly at shoulder level – the Jackie look. Behind them, leaning over the couch, one heavy-fingered hand resting on (or gripping?) the shoulder of each of his daughters, is Tudor Lorscott. His chin just grazes the top of his wife’s hair, and his look is smug, proprietary: “This is mine.” Tudor Lorscott, lord of the manor. A man to be envied.

The final photos are fuzzy grey-and-white reprints of wireservice pictures. The newspapers’ invariable records of crime and punishment: the crime scene, the arrest, the trial, a sequence as familiar to us now as photos of Shirley Temple and Deanna Durbin were to our parents. Except this is Eve Boychuk’s family. The figures on the stretchers being loaded into the ambulance are Eve’s father and mother. The tanned, lithe figure in a white turtleneck sweater and capri pants, looking disconcertingly ordinary in the sea of uniforms, is Eve’s sister, Nancy. The girl with the dead eyes, raising her hand against the camera as if to ward off a blow, is Eve.

The account of the trial was surprisingly circumspect. Even in a city where a circulation war between the two evening papers was always on the boil, reporters couldn’t find much juice in an attempted murder trial where no one would say anything.

But there were pictures and there were captions: a picture of the alleged weapon – a small hatchet, wooden-handled, Nancy Lorscott’s old Girl Guide hatchet but fitted with a new steel head with a cutting edge like a razor; a close-up of a bloody Tudor Lorscott as he was wheeled into the hospital. (“How did he look?” asked the
Examiner
’s reporter. “He looked,” said the reliable source, “as if someone tried to cut off his head and his private parts.”)

There was a brief account of the sentencing: the judge’s decision that Nancy Lorscott should be committed to the Middlesex Prison for the Criminally Insane (a sentence later commuted to indefinite treatment in a private sanitarium). But of the trial itself, not much beyond a dry recital of the exchange of legalisms between the Crown and the defence, the expert testimony of the expert witnesses, and a running account of what the Lorscott women wore to court.

Of course, there were many pictures of Eve – the only accessible Lorscott during those weeks after the assault. Eve getting out of her car in front of the handsome Victorian hall that served as Port Durham’s courtroom building; Eve visiting the hospital where her parents were convalescing; Eve coming out of her dentist’s office. And always the same small smile and the same dead eyes.

Eve Lorscott was twenty years old in 1963. Enough trauma there to last a lifetime. But this was not Eve’s last trauma. Nor, if one believed the speculations of the psychiatrist called by Nancy’s lawyers, was it her first.

Poor Eve. Poor, poor Eve.

I was trying to find the Eve I knew in the tiny grey face in the newspaper photo when the telephone rang. It was Soren Eames, and he sounded awful. Whatever shreds of pride had impelled him to take me down the hill without accomplishing what he had set out to accomplish were gone. There were no courtly preambles this time.

“Joanne, I have to see you.”

And then, when I didn’t answer immediately, he apologized.

“I’m sorry for what happened at Wolf River. I’m doing a lot to make myself unhappy these days.” His voice trailed off and, for a beat, there was silence on the other end of the line. When he spoke again, his voice sounded better – if not strong at least assured and in control. “Joanne, I’m on a really life-denying trajectory now, and I need to talk. I can be at your place in an hour. Tonight or tomorrow – which?”

The jargon and narcissism ate at me – the life-denying trajectory and the string of sentences starting with “I.” When I was a kid there was a game we played at birthday parties. Each child was given five beans, and every time we used the word “I” in a conversation we had to forfeit a bean. Soren Eames struck me as a man who would lose his beans pretty quickly.

Whatever the reason, I said no: no to the next hour, no to the next day. After the darkness of the past month, I wanted a birthday that was sunny and uncomplicated, and I told him so. I would see him, but it would have to wait. We agreed to meet at nine o’clock the morning after my birthday at my house. I was not looking forward to it.

CHAPTER

14

The late afternoon sun filtered through the leaves of the cottonwood tree outside the window of the granny flat and made shadow patterns on my desk: a changing play of light and darkness. It occurred to me that before Soren Eames and I had our meeting it would be wise to find out more about the Miracle Man of Wolf River. It was almost 6:00 p.m. in Ottawa. Rick Spenser would be at his house on River Street pouring Beefeaters into a chilled glass. It would be a pleasure to talk to a happy man.

Rick really did sound glad to hear from me. He was buoyant. It had been a good day. The temperature in Ottawa had finally dropped, and the afternoon had been brisk and bright. Even better for a man who hated campaign travel, it looked as if there would be no federal election call. The government polls were down, and just before Rick left his office for the day, a junior minister had phoned to say the government would wait till spring. Rick was celebrating. He’d stopped at the market and he was in the middle of shredding beets for a pot of borscht “in honour of our friend Andy Boychuk,” he said, laughing.

But as soon as I mentioned Soren Eames there was a pause, and when I asked if he’d had trouble finding information on Eames, he sounded sullen.

“I didn’t see it as being worth the bother. I asked one of our researchers to look into it, and she came up with a one-page summary of a rather dismal life – nothing we didn’t know. If you insist, I’ll have her look again.”

“Yeah, I insist,” I said, laughing.

“So be it,” he said, sharply.

Whatever ambivalence he felt about Soren Eames the man, Rick’s journalistic instincts weren’t dulled. When I mentioned Eames’s phone call, the line crackled with interest: What had he said? What had I said? What were my impressions? He congratulated me on my decision to put off seeing Soren until after my birthday. “No use wasting your time on a charlatan, Joanne,” he said – a typical Rick line, but he hadn’t read it well. There was uneasiness in his voice, and I thought I knew why.

Even when I was young I hadn’t been good at boy-girl games. Another woman would have been quick to grab hold of this show of vulnerability. I wasn’t.

“Rick, listen. The only reason I’m seeing Soren Eames again is because I think he knows something. There’s a connection there.”

His answer came from far away. “Good night, Joanne. I’ll call you tomorrow night before I go to bed, ten o’clock your time, midnight here. They won’t have done the daylight savings thing by then.” He sounded fretful.

I laughed. “Rick, it doesn’t matter. Call when you’re near a phone.”

“Ten o’clock,” he said again. “And, Joanne, I’ll get the research person to send what she comes up with on Eames directly to you. Have a splendid day tomorrow. I wish you that.”

The first thing I heard on my forty-sixth birthday was the phone ringing, then my daughter’s voice laughing, tuneless, singing a crazy birthday song I’d made up for her when she was little. The kids always screamed and yelled when I started to sing it, but it was as much a part of all their birthdays as the ugly plastic tree loaded with jellybeans that was the invariable birthday centrepiece and the mug with parrots singing “Happy bird day to you” that was always at the birthday kid’s place on the table. So much a part of their birthdays but never – until that morning – of mine. That Mieka would sing it to me signalled a change in our relationship. When she finished, she was laughing, and I was crying.

“Oh, Mieka, that was beautiful.”

“Mum, that was awful.”

“Well, yeah, but beautiful that you phoned me up and sang. Does it sound that bad when I do it?”

“Worse, Mum, worse.”

“Mieka, it is so wonderful to hear your voice.” And then we were away on a lovely, aimless conversation about the boys (“Tell them I miss them and gently remind them the present for you is under the sleeping bag in Angus’s cupboard”) and her classes (“The woman who teaches my English class is so much like you – that first day I wanted to follow her home like a puppy”) and my growing conviction that Rick Spenser was interested in me (“Well, why wouldn’t he be? Except for your singing and your worrying, you’re practically a perfect person”). Mother-daughter stuff.

Finally I forced myself to look at the clock. “Mieka, I hate for us to stop, but this is costing you a fortune and we can get caught up when we go to Winnipeg for Thanksgiving. It’s only a week from today. I can’t believe how quickly the fall is going.”

There was no response.

“Mieka?”

Her voice was gentle but firm. “Mum, I’m not going to Winnipeg for Thanksgiving.” And then, “Greg’s parents have a cottage at Emma Lake, and they’ve invited me to spend the Thanksgiving weekend with them and Gregory. I really want to do this. I’ve told them yes, Mum.”

No room to negotiate. No need to negotiate. She was grown-up. She wanted to spend the weekend with the family of a man she was interested in. Outwardly I was gracious, upbeat, and when I hung up we were both laughing. But inside I was raging. It was, I thought, as I looked at my indisputably forty-six-year-old face in the mirror, one hell of a way to begin a birthday.

It didn’t get any better in the next hour. The boys were at each other from the moment they got up. They fought like a pair of six-year-olds over who got to hand me my birthday present, and the truce at breakfast was a fragile one. Peter couldn’t find his Latin book, and Angus, for the first time since kindergarten, decided he didn’t want to go to school. As I stood on our front porch, shivering in the chill, watching Angus snake up the road toward grade eight, I was not exactly brimming with radiance and peace. When a black Porsche pulled up in front of my house and I saw a slender man in black get out of the driver’s seat, I felt like giving up on being forty-six altogether. The man was Soren Eames.

I was still in my robe. I had brushed my teeth, but I hadn’t showered. I was in no mood for being on either side of a therapy session. If Soren hadn’t already spotted me, I think I would have made it simple and not answered the door, but it was too late. He was coming up the front walk toward me, trying to smile but looking tense. He was carrying a blue box from Birks – the kind you get when you buy a really pricy piece of china or crystal.

He stopped at the bottom of the porch stairs and handed the box to me.

“Many happy returns, Joanne.”

I just stood there.

“Aren’t you going to open it?”

I started to give the box back.

“No,” he said. “Let’s go inside. Please. Once you open the box, I think you’ll understand some things.”

He followed me into the house. I went through to the kitchen, poured us both some coffee and joined him in the living room.

The blue box was on the coffee table between us. Soren leaned over and pushed it toward me.

“Please, Joanne.”

I think I knew as soon as I pulled back the tissue paper and saw the little ceramic figure inside. I had seen it before. In fact, one blistering Canada Day weekend I had bought it at a craft fair in the southwest corner of the province. It was the work of a local artist, and it was a lovely, witty piece – a cabbage, perfect in every detail, unfolding its top leaves like a flower. Rising from the heart of the cabbage is a woman with the broad hips and heavy breasts of the Ukraine. She is wearing a brown peasant’s dress, and a bright kerchief covers her hair. Her face, with its sweep of Slavic cheekbones and bright blue eyes, is uncannily like Roma Boychuk’s. The woman’s arms are raised toward heaven, and in her hands, solemn and handsome, is a baby boy. The piece is called “Ukrainian Genesis,” and as soon as Andy Boychuk saw it that July day he had to have it.

I did the purchasing. Andy paid me later. When you’re in politics and you go to a show where all the work is by local artists, it’s prudent not to single one artist out and stiff the rest. Andy had loved that piece. I would have sworn it hadn’t left his desk since the day he bought it. Except “Ukrainian Genesis” had left his desk. Somewhere along the line he had given it to Soren Eames; and now Soren Eames was giving it to me.

“How?” I asked.

“It was a gift, a gift to commemorate a special time for me. It was a wonderful gesture.”