Authors: Gail Bowen
The moment Willie spotted Taylor, he had bounded towards her. Now, tail pounding the frozen earth, he sat in front of her and Ethan, waiting for someone to acknowledge his presence.
Ethan tensed. “Get the dog away,” he said. He looked as if he was going to cry, but the hand holding the knife against my daughter’s throat didn’t move. “Get the dog away. If he jumps up on me now, my hand could slip.”
“Willie, come,” I said. He cocked his head as if he was attempting to remember a word from an ancient language.
“Come,” I said again. Amazingly, he loped towards me. “Good dog,” I said, then I grabbed his collar.
“Put him in the house,” Ethan’s voice cracked with emotion. He tightened his hold on Taylor and guided her towards the studio.
With my hand still looped through Willie’s collar, I took him back to the house, pushed him into the kitchen, and closed the door. His howls of indignation followed me as I ran towards the studio; Ethan and Taylor were already inside. Surprisingly, Ethan made no move to stop me when I opened the door. He was still standing behind Taylor, but he had changed the position of the knife. Now the handle was clasped in his closed fist and the shaft was vertical with its point touching the tender flesh under my daughter’s chin.
Taylor was dangerously pale. “Ethan, you have to stop this,” I said. “Taylor’s going into shock.”
“Lean against me, Taylor,” he said gently. “You know – the way Chloe leans against Soul-fire. It’s all in the book I left for you.” Taylor’s eyes were half-closed, she swayed. “You did read it, didn’t you?” Ethan asked. Taylor remained silent, and Ethan exploded. “You were supposed to read the book. It explains everything.” He shook his head. “I can’t believe you didn’t read it. You’re just like all the others.” The tip of the knife pierced the skin on her throat, and a drop of blood appeared.
When I saw her blood, I reacted immediately. “I didn’t give her the book,” I said. “It’s my fault.”
Ethan eyes met mine. “So she doesn’t know.”
I shook my head. “No, Taylor doesn’t know anything.”
“I can tell her,” Ethan said. His voice became very soft. “It’s the end of Chloe and Soul-fire – their last adventure. They’re attacked by this monster dragon. She’s huge and she can’t be killed. Soul-fire does his best. He takes his sword and plunges it into the dragon’s neck again and again. There’s blood … blood everywhere. Finally, the head is severed, but it grows back – not just one head but two. Every time, Soul-fire cuts off a head, two grow back in its place. He tries so hard, but he knows the dragon will always be there. Soul-fire knows that the one place the dragon won’t follow him is through the Gates of Death. So he takes his golden knife and he holds it to Chloe’s throat and …”
Taylor’s eyes seemed to roll back in her head; her knees buckled and she crumpled to the floor. I knelt and took her in my arms. Ethan raised the hand that held the knife.
“Don’t,” I said, shielding my daughter’s body with my own.
“No matter how much I try to kill her, she never goes away,” Ethan said. “I smashed in her head and she grows another one. She comes to me in my dreams.”
My face was pressed against my daughter’s body. I turned my head so that I could see Ethan. “Who comes to you in your dreams?” I asked.
“My mother,” he said.
That was when I screamed.
“Stop,” Ethan said. “Please just stop.” But I didn’t. I screamed again and again and again.
“I don’t want to kill anybody else,” Ethan said. Beneath me, Taylor’s body was so boneless that I could feel the beating of her heart. When the studio door opened, I felt cold air, then I heard Zack’s voice. “Come over here to me, Ethan,” he said.
Eyes closed, I waited, still shielding Taylor from what was to come. Ethan’s footsteps moved towards the door, and I thought how vulnerable Zack was in his wheelchair. “Give me the knife,” Zack said. The silence that followed was interminable. Then Zack said the words that finally allowed me to exhale. “Good move,” he said. “Now we can figure out what to do next.”
I helped Taylor to her feet. She was still pale, but her body was no longer limp. I took in the scene. Zack’s chair blocked the doorway. Ethan was facing him, his back to us.
“What’s going to happen to me?” he asked.
“The police are out front,” Zack said. “We weren’t sure what was going on, so they let me come ahead. What will happen next is up to you.”
“I killed my mother,” Ethan said. “She wasn’t going to let me go trick-or-treating with Taylor.”
Taylor gasped, but if he was shocked, Zack didn’t reveal it. His tone was matter of fact. “Then you’re going to need someone who’s on your side.”
Ethan hung his head. “No one’s on my side.”
Zack’s eyes met mine. I nodded.
“I’m on your side,” Zack said. “I won’t lie to you. You’re in a lot of trouble, but you’re thirteen years old, and that means the law thinks you deserve another chance. Do you think you deserve another chance?”
“I don’t know,” Ethan said.
“Well, you’re going to have some time to consider the question.” Zack reached into his pocket, pulled out a package of Spearmint LifeSavers, and offered it to Ethan. “Want one?” he asked.
“I guess,” Ethan said, and he popped a LifeSaver into his mouth.
Zack waited as Ethan crunched his candy, then he turned his chair to the door. “Time to face the music, kiddo. Are you ready?”
Ethan nodded. “Could I have another LifeSaver?”
Zack handed him the packet and looked over at me. “I’ll be home in a couple of hours. Are you and Taylor going to be okay till then?”
“We’re going to be fine,” I said. After Zack and Ethan left, I put my arm around my daughter and led her to the house. “Taylor, I think we should see a doctor.”
“No,” she wailed. “No. I don’t want to go out. Not now. Just let me stay here with you.” Her eyes were huge and frightened.
“All right. We can stay here,” I said. “Let’s go up to the bathroom so I can put something on that nick under your chin.”
I had to close my eyes as I dabbed hydrogen peroxide on the spot where the knife had broken my daughter’s skin. If the blade had gone deeper, I could have lost her. “Ethan didn’t hurt you in any other way, did he?” I asked.
Taylor shook her head, and I said a silent prayer of thanks. I ran a hot bath, poured in the lavender milk bath powder, and helped my daughter sink into the water. Then I brought her a mug of sweet, milky tea and set it on the edge of the bathtub.
“Want me to stay or leave?” I asked.
“Stay,” she said. I flipped down the toilet lid, and then, for the first time since she’d moved into our house, Taylor and I spent a half-hour together in utter silence. After she’d towelled off, I helped her into her pyjamas, tucked her into bed with more tea and a plate of toast, and stayed with her until she fell asleep. Then I went into my bathroom and dialed Zack’s number.
“I’ve been trying to get you,” he said.
“I turned down the ringer on the phone so Taylor could get some rest.”
“How’s she doing?”
“It’s hard to say. She’s asleep now.”
“How are you doing?”
“I wish you were here.”
“I will be,” he said. “A few more hoops to jump through on this end.”
“So what’s happening?”
“Ethan told me his story. I have to get in touch with his father. The
YCJA –
sorry, the Youth Criminal Justice Act – says parents have to be notified, involved, and in some cases ordered to attend youth court proceedings. But Ethan’s mother is dead …”
“Because Ethan killed her,” I said.
“Can’t talk about that,” Zack said, “but I do need to get in touch with Ethan’s father and Ethan won’t tell me his name or where he lives.”
I gave Zack the number Douglas Thorpe had given me. “I should warn you,” I said. “This man is a total prick.”
“I’ve always wanted to meet a total prick,” Zack said. “I guess today’s my lucky day. So what do you think? Is Douglas Thorpe going to tell me to take a hike, so his trusted family lawyer who hasn’t been in a criminal courtroom in thirty years can take over?”
“He won’t be pleased that you’re involved,” I said. “You’re high profile, and Mr. Thorpe wants this to go away.”
“Even if his son gets buried in the system until all of us are but a memory?”
“I think that would be his preference.”
“Hey, guess what?” Zack said. “Mr. Thorpe’s preference doesn’t count. According to the
YCJA
, if Ethan’s father’s choices aren’t in Ethan’s best interests, Ethan has the right to be represented by a counsel independent of dear old Dad.”
“You sure you want to take this on?” I said.
“You bet,” Zack said. “That kid has not had what I would call a lucky life. Right now, there’s a psychologist testing him to see just how damaged he is.”
“Anyone who talked to Ethan for five minutes would know he has serious problems.”
“The system runs on experts, Jo. The opinion an expert forms now will help down the road when it comes to sentencing.”
“What’s going to happen to him?”
“The charge will be murder. Because of Ethan’s age, if it’s first degree, the maximum sentence is ten years; if it’s second degree, seven years max.”
“So Ethan could be back walking among us when he’s twenty.”
“Do I detect a hardening of your gentle heart?”
“I’ll get over it,” I said. “Whatever happened to easy answers?”
Zack laughed softly. “Welcome to my world.”
CHAPTER
15
Taylor was still sleeping when I went back to her room. I pulled her desk chair close to the bed and drank her in. She was beginning to look like herself again. Her cheeks were rosy with sleep, and her breathing was deep. When she awoke, she cat-stretched and furrowed her forehead. “What time is it?”
“A little after noon. You slept through the cannons.”
For a moment she seemed confused. “So it really is my birthday,” she said.
“Yes.”
“And all that stuff with Ethan really happened.”
“Yes.” I moved closer, “Taylor, I think it will help if you tell me about it.”
Taylor’s usual speaking voice was melodic, but that morning the music was gone. As she described the time she’d spent with Ethan, her tone was lifeless. “Somebody threw something – pebbles, I guess – against my window. I thought it was Gracie and Isobel coming to surprise me, so I ran downstairs. When I opened the kitchen door, Ethan was there. Everything happened so fast. Ethan pushed past me, slammed the door, and grabbed me. He had that knife. He said a bunch of stuff about Soul-fire and Chloe. I was really scared – not just because of the knife, but because of the way he looked. He told me to get my jacket because we were going away together. I said I didn’t want to go. Then he pointed the knife at my heart.” Taylor touched the left side of her chest. “This is where my heart is, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” I said. “That’s where it is.”
Taylor moved her hand reflexively over the vulnerable area. “He made me go to this place under the footbridge where he used to hang out after school.” She raised her eyes to me. “He kept his knife pointed at me in case I yelled if anyone went by on the bike path. Sitting still like that I got really cold, and I said I wanted to go home. Ethan said we didn’t have homes any more – we just had each other. I knew I had to get away, so I told him I’d made a painting of Soul-fire and it was in my studio.”
“Was there really a painting?”
She nodded. “I was going to send it to him at his new school. I wanted him to know everybody didn’t hate him. We were on our way to see the painting when … when you came.” Taylor closed her eyes, moaned, and turned away from me. I sat on her bed and stroked her back.
“It’s all right,” I said. “Everything’s all right.”
“Where is he?” she asked.
“Zack took him to police headquarters.”
“And he won’t be able to get out.”
“Not for a long time.”
“Nothing will ever be the same,” she said.
She was silent again, and I could feel her drifting from me. I had not given birth to Taylor, but from the day she came to me, the connection between us could not have been closer. She was a girl whose life was filled with passions: her family, her friends, her animals, making and experiencing art, chatting, eating with gusto everything from paella to licorice whips. No matter what her mood, I had always known how to reach her, but that day I was at a loss, and so I waited.
Finally, responding to one of those inexplicable internal shifts that push us back from the abyss and into life again, Taylor sat up. “Can we go down to the creek? There might be some birds.”
“Good idea,” I said. Her decision didn’t surprise me. Taylor was four when she became part of our family, but she had already known a lifetime of tragedy. Within a period of six months, every adult in Taylor’s life had died. I adopted her because she was the daughter of the woman who had been my closest childhood friend and because there was no one else to care for her. A frightened child, she was saved by three things: her art, our family, and the creek that flowed behind our house.
For a body of water in a residential area close to the heart of the city, it was large – twenty-five metres across. In spring, the creek was swollen and tumultuous with runoff from snowy fields on the outskirts of town; in summer and fall it was tranquil, a mirror reflecting the prairie’s living skies; in winter it was ice, thick enough to support skaters and tobogganers. Always, it was a place of rustling indigenous grasses and intense bird and animal life.
The first spring Taylor was with us, I bought her a sketchbook and she and I had started a bird list. At the beginning, she had drawn pictures of the birds she spotted, and I had written their names. In later years, Taylor had recorded her finds herself, but she continued to draw detailed miniatures of the birds she identified: the rare ones that swooped down for a moment in the course of their great migration, and the usual suspects that were part of our everyday lives: western grebes, cormorants, mallards, mourning doves, thrashers, warblers, blackbirds, and the faithful and ubiquitous sparrows. She began her bird record anew every year – seven books so far. The eighth, pocket-sized and bright orange, was waiting on her plate with the rest of her forgotten birthday gifts.
Taylor pulled underwear, socks, blue jeans, and a shirt out of her dresser drawers and went into the bathroom. When she came back, she was dressed and she’d run a comb through her hair.
“Ready to go?” I said.
She hesitated. I could see the uncertainty in her eyes, but she knew she couldn’t stay in bed forever.
The world we walked out into was the shade of half-mourning that grieving Victorians used to affect after the blackness of the first grief was fading. Earlier, the sun had sent out a few tentative beams, but they’d been extinguished by the weight of a November sky. Underfoot, the wintry earth was leached of colour. A skim of ice covered the silent creek.
With no particular plan, Taylor and I sat on the bench we favoured and looked around us. After a while, she pointed across the creek to a tree, leafless and gaunt against the scudding clouds. “I saw a Japanese etching like that at the Mackenzie Gallery,” she said. “Just earth, tree, and sky. Ink and paper. The lines were so simple, but every stroke was right. I wanted to make art like that.”
“You still can,” I said. “Taylor, that tree is still there.”
“And it’s still beautiful,” she said.
“Yes,” I said. “It’s still beautiful.”
From the outset, Taylor was determined to go back to her old life, and all the external signs indicated that she had succeeded. The phone kept on ringing, the round of birthday parties and sleepovers continued, and as always, she was diligent about the schoolwork that she saw as a necessary evil to be dealt with before she could get back to her art. But she was edgy, easily startled, with a new and worrying habit of staring into space. For the first time ever, she asked me to sit with her in her studio while she worked. I brought in a folding chair and cleared a place for my laptop at the end of the table where she stored her paint tubes and brushes. Most of the time we worked in comfortable silence, but occasionally she asked about Ethan, and I passed along what I’d heard from Zack. The news was never good, and one afternoon I asked Taylor if she’d rather I didn’t tell her what was happening.
“I need to know,” she said. “It’s worse just imagining.”
Creating a mural for the walls that enclosed our new pool was therapeutic. Working at her sketches, Taylor seemed able to transcend the anxiety that had dogged her since the terrible morning of her birthday. When, finally, it was time to start painting in earnest, she was eager. The construction crew put up scaffolding so that Taylor could reach the tops of the walls and the ceiling, and as she climbed it, I could see her old confidence returning.
Taylor had made several small paintings of our old pool and I was curious about how the pool would figure in the new mural. As it turned out, it was the vibrant colour of the tiles that had attracted her. Before she began the mural Taylor covered the walls with a gem-bright paint that had the opalescent sheen of sun bouncing off turquoise. To stand in that room with the sunlight pouring through the windows of the room’s west wall was to experience a joy that was uncomplicated and unquenchable. Then Taylor began to add shadows and half-tones, and the mood changed. Some of the areas she shaded were small. Like the missing tiles in our old pool, these splashes of black made the blue around them sparkle with greater intensity. But there were larger areas of shadow too; spaces that seemed to beckon and threaten like the mouths of underwater caves. The fish Taylor painted swimming in the sunlit water were jewel-bright and playful, but the mud-coloured fish that swam through the curling plumes of weeds in the shadows were menacing. More eloquently than words, Taylor’s mural conveyed the truth that the sweetness of life can be taken away in an instant.
She waited almost two weeks before she painted the human swimmers on the mural, and the figures were unlike any she’d drawn before. Faceless, strong-bodied, wearing simply cut suits in bold primary colours, their powerful limbs propelled them effortlessly through sun and shadow alike. When I watched them come to life, the relief washed over me. My daughter was recovering.
Taylor had wanted to keep the mural a surprise for Zack until it was finished. When the big day came, she made him close his eyes as he wheeled himself in.
“This isn’t a joke, is it?” he said. “I’m not headed for the edge of the pool.”
“No joke!” Taylor said. “And you can open your eyes now.”
It was the only time in our relationship that I ever saw Zack at a loss for words. He looked around, shook his head in disbelief, and turned his chair to face Taylor.
“This is brilliant, Taylor. You must know that.” He held his hand out to her. “Could we look at it together?”
She shrugged, but I could tell she was pleased.
I watched as they moved around the mural. Occasionally, Taylor would point something out or Zack would ask a question, but mostly they simply examined her work with the care and the seriousness it demanded.
When they came back, Zack slid his arm around my waist. “How lucky can we get?” he said.
Taylor was standing on the other side of Zack’s chair, and when I looked into their faces, the words formed themselves. “I was just asking myself that very thing,” I said.
The weeks leading up to Christmas were full. My research on the values war was coming together, and Jill asked if I’d be interested in writing a documentary on the subject for Nation
TV
. I’d sketched out a proposal, and it was a rush to sit at my laptop and lose track of time because I was having so much fun.
Zack was busy too, but his work wasn’t fun. Ethan’s case was viciously depressing – in large part because Ethan didn’t care what happened to him. His despair was exacerbated by guilt. Given what we had come to know about Ethan, it wasn’t a surprise when he confessed that, in an attempt to prove his worth to his mother, he had planted the bomb that blew up Zack’s office. Kathryn died without knowing how desperate her son had been to gain her approval. Now her son’s only lifeline was the man he tried to kill, and that painful truth was driving Ethan into a vortex of self-loathing and depression. Zack had managed to get Ethan committed to a mental health facility in North Battleford, but Ethan’s prognosis was a constant source of worry. And, as always with Zack, there were new files: the juiciest involved a government minister who had allegedly harassed, stalked, and then attempted to poison a colleague.
I had my own distractions: writing a mid-sabbatical report on my work, Christmas shopping, sorting through the dozens of invitations to parties Zack and I were expected to attend, deciding if my good black dress could survive what was shaping up to be a punishing social schedule.
Then there was Howard. He had pled guilty to obstruction of justice and been sentenced to a month at the detox centre and two hundred hours of community service. He was working off his sentence at the food bank, and I joined him in the warehouse two afternoons a week to pack Christmas hampers. It was a chilly job, and Howard was never without his scarlet, merry elves toque. When the other workers called him Old Saint Nick, he didn’t seem to mind.
Every night at six o’clock, Zack came home to have dinner with Taylor and me, and afterwards the three of us went over to check out developments at the new house. The renovations were proceeding at a pace that made me wonder if our new home would always be a work-in-progress, but McCudden was unflappable. He assured us that, contrary to appearances, we would be able to move in on January 1, and he spoke with such conviction that we continued to plan as if we would.
Every Sunday, without fail, Zack came to church with Taylor and me. When we had formally asked the dean of our cathedral to marry us, he hadn’t been quick to agree. He suggested that before we discussed the matter further, he and Zack have a talk alone. I didn’t question James’s judgment. I was a known quantity, and Zack was a very large question mark. The two men met several times. When I asked Zack what they’d discussed, he was circumspect. “Mostly, we talked about the kind of person you are and the kind of person I am. Then James asked me if I knew the difference between a contract and a covenant.”
“Did you?”
“Sure. A covenant is a contract made with the heart.”
A week before Christmas, Taylor came back from a shopping expedition with Gracie and Isobel, went to her room, and returned with a package in a gift bag. “Do you think Zack could get this to Ethan?” she asked.
“Zack always seems to find a way,” I said. “Could you tell me what’s in there?”
Taylor looked away. “Drawing pens and a sketchbook.”
When I gave Zack the package, he nodded approvingly. “I’m grateful to Taylor,” he said. “This present takes one name off my Christmas list. And I wasn’t looking forward to trying to find a gift for the kid who has nothing.”
“Is Ethan making any headway?”
“Without revealing too much, my client thinks his life is over. He may be right, but he still has another sixty years to put in on this planet, so he’s going to have to figure something out. Taylor’s present was inspired. I’ll see what else I can find to give him a reason to wake up in the morning.”
My family had always been hidebound traditionalists when it came to Christmas. We always bought the same kind of tree, put it up on the same day, and decorated it with the ornaments we’d used since the kids were little. We always unwrapped one present Christmas Eve and saved stockings and the rest of the gifts until morning. Even the suggestion that we might experiment with the recipe for the Yorkshire pudding we served with the Christmas rolled prime rib was rejected out of hand.