A Killing Spring (17 page)

“Good,” I said.

“How good could it be if you’re home by nine o’clock?” Then he grinned. “Alex called.”

“And …?”

“And he said he was heading out to Standing Buffalo for a couple of days. He said if we need him, we can get in touch through the band office.” My son looked at me expectantly. “Aren’t you going to call him?”

“Angus, I think he meant we could call if there was an emergency.”

Angus rolled his eyes, but for once he held his tongue. Leah came over and handed me a piece of paper. “You had another call,” she said. “I hope you can read my writing.”

“Let’s see,” I said. “Grace from the Faculty Club called. She found the picture. She wouldn’t have bothered me at home, except she thought I seemed worried about it the other night, and I can call her at the club until ten p.m.” I
held the neatly written note out to Angus, who had long been known as the black hole of messages. “This is how it’s done, kiddo. Note the inclusion of all pertinent facts.”

“Hey,” he said. “I’ve got a life.”

I kissed him. “And you’re now free to lead it. Thanks for staying with Taylor, you guys. Angus, don’t be too late. Church tomorrow. It’s Palm Sunday.”

He groaned, grabbed Leah’s hand, and headed for the door.

I turned. “Okay, Miss, bath-time for you.” When he heard my voice, Benny arched his back and hissed. I looked him in the eye. “T,” I said, “why don’t you throw Benny into the tub, too. I think he’s starting to look a little scruffy.”

While Taylor ran her bath, I called Grace at the Faculty Club. Her news was unsettling. The cleaners had found the photo of Reed and Annalie when they’d emptied out the receptacle for used paper towels in the men’s washroom. Grace had been puzzled. “It was just an old newspaper clipping,” she said. “Why would anybody go to all that trouble?”

I told her I didn’t know, but as I hung up I thought it would be worth a couple of phone calls to try to find out. On her message to Reed Gallagher, Annalie Brinkmann had said her area code was 416 – that was Toronto. I dialled Information. There was only one “A. Brinkmann” listed and, as the phone rang, I felt my pulse quicken. But it wasn’t Annalie who answered; it was her husband.

Cal Woodrow was a pleasant and helpful man. When he told me that Annalie was in Germany attending a family funeral, he must have heard the disappointment in my voice.

“If it’s urgent, I can get her to call you,” he said. “She’ll be phoning here Wednesday night.”

“It’s not urgent,” I said. “But maybe you can tell me something. Did your wife know that Reed Gallagher died?”

“No,” he said. “She’d left for Dusseldorf by the time the obituary appeared in the
Globe and Mail
. I didn’t see any
point in breaking the news to her when she called to tell me she’d arrived safely. Isn’t it strange that after all this time …?” He didn’t complete the sentence.

“After all this time what?” I asked.

“No,” he said decisively. “That’s Annalie’s story to tell or not to tell.”

“Could I leave my number?”

“Of course,” he said. “Annalie will be most interested in talking to anyone who knew Reed Gallagher.”

It was 9:45 when I tucked Taylor in. She’d brought the Marc Chagall book to bed with her, and she asked me whether her mother had given me the Marc Chagall book because Chagall was her favourite or because she thought he was mine. It was the first time Taylor had talked about her mother openly, and her healthy curiosity about Sally made me optimistic. Maybe Ed Mariani was right in believing that art was the answer.

When I turned out Taylor’s light, I went downstairs, made myself a pot of tea, and picked up my briefcase. I was tired, but I was too edgy for sleep. There were a couple of journal articles I had to plough through before class Monday, and this seemed as good a time as any to get started. When I pulled the articles out, I saw Kellee Savage’s unclaimed essay, and I felt a sting of irritation. Present or absent, Kellee was a problem that wouldn’t go away. On impulse, I picked up the phone and dialled her number. No answer. It was a south-end number, and it suddenly occurred to me that I could stop by her place on the way to church. There were only two weeks of classes left. If Kellee was lying low, watching Oprah and eating Sara Lee, it was time she shaped up and came back to school.

I went over to my desk, took out my box of index cards, and pulled out the section marked Political Science 371 – the Politics and the Media seminar. I flipped through, stopping
to smile at Jumbo Hryniuk’s. The students filled out their own cards with name, address, and reason for taking the course. Jumbo had stated his reason succinctly: “Because in this day and age, nobody can afford to be just a jock.” Fair enough. When I pulled out Kellee Savage’s card and checked her address, I felt as if a piece had suddenly dropped into place in the puzzle. Two addresses were listed. One was her Regina address, and the other was the one she called her home address: 72 Church Street, Indian Head, SK.

She had gone home. The obvious answer to her whereabouts had been there all along. I reached for the phone and dialled the Indian Head number. The phone was picked up on the first ring. It was a man’s voice. “Kellee?” he said.

“No,” I said. “But I’m looking for her. My name’s Joanne Kilbourn. I teach Political Science at the university. Kellee’s one of my students, but she hasn’t been in class for a week. I wanted to get in touch with her; I was afraid that there might be a problem.”

“My name is Neil McCallum,” the man said. “I’m Kellee’s friend, and that’s what I’m afraid of, too.” He spoke slowly, and there was a slight distortion in his pronunciations, as if he had a speech impediment. He paused, as if giving careful consideration to what he was about to say. Then he cleared his throat and made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. “Maybe,” he said, “we could help each other.”

By 2:00 on the afternoon of Palm Sunday, I was on my way to meet Neil McCallum. After church, I had driven over to Gordon Road and stopped by Kellee’s apartment. The building she lived in was called the Sharon Arms. It was a new and charmless building, but it was handy to the university and secure. In the outside lobby, there was an intercom with the usual panel of buzzers opposite the appropriate apartment numbers and name slots. On the information card she had filled out for the Politics and the Media seminar, Kellee had written that she lived in apartment 425. The name slot opposite the buzzer for 425 was empty, but that didn’t surprise me. All of Kellee’s actions on St. Patrick’s Day suggested she was a woman who saw herself surrounded by outside threats; it made sense that she wouldn’t advertise her whereabouts. I had pressed Kellee’s buzzer long enough to let anyone inside know that I wasn’t a casual caller, but there was no response.

By the time I got home, I’d made up my mind. I was going to Indian Head. I called Sylvie O’Keefe and we arranged a double-header for her son, Jess, and Taylor: lunch with me
at McDonald’s, then bowling with Sylvie at the lanes at the Golden Mile.

As I drove east along the Trans-Canada towards Indian Head, I saw that the fields were already bare of snow. It wouldn’t be long before farmers were back on the land, and the cycle of risk and hope would begin again. It took self-discipline not to turn off onto the road that wound through the Qu’Appelle Hills towards the Standing Buffalo Reserve and Alex Kequahtooway. Alex had been a strong and passionate presence in my life for months, and I ached for him. I turned on the radio, hoping to shift my focus. Jussi Björling was singing
“M’appari tutt’amor”
from
Martha
. There had never been a time in my life when I hadn’t thrilled to Björling, but as Lionel, his despair as he recalled his former happiness and hopes cut too close to the bone. I leaned forward and turned him off in mid-aria.

For twenty minutes I drove in silence, yearning like a schoolgirl. A few kilometres outside Indian Head, I realized that, before I met Neil McCallum, I had to get a grip on myself. I pulled over on the shoulder, turned off the ignition, got out and looked at the prairie. The sky was clear, and the air was sweet. In the ditch at the side of the road, the first pussy willows were growing, and I broke off some branches to take back to Taylor. The catkins were silky and soft, and the woody, wet smell of the willows filled the car, a foretaste of April, with its mingling of memory and desire. An omen, or so I hoped.

I hadn’t hesitated about promising Neil McCallum that I’d drive seventy kilometres to talk to him. His recital of the reasons behind his growing concern about Kellee had been a Euclidean line of facts that pointed in only one direction: something was terribly wrong. Neil and Kellee were the same age; they had grown up next door to one another, and,
according to him, they had always been close. The year Kellee graduated from high school, her parents had been killed in a car accident, and she and Neil became even closer. When Kellee went off to university, he had helped pack her things; since then, he had been the one who had made sure her house was ready for her when she came home.

For three years, Kellee’s routine, when she was at school, had not varied. She called Neil every Wednesday, she took the 6:20 bus back to Indian Head every other Friday, and she left on the 4:30 bus, Sunday afternoon. But on Friday, February 24, the pattern had changed. She had been home the weekend before; nonetheless, on the twenty-fourth she’d taken the bus back to Indian Head. She’d come home the next two weekends too; then on the weekend of March 17, her birthday, although she had told Neil to expect her, she hadn’t shown up. He hadn’t seen or heard from her since.

As I turned off the highway and drove over the railway tracks and down the tree-lined streets towards the centre of town, I found myself wondering about Kellee’s best friend. The directions he’d given me were a model of clarity, but a certain thickness in his speech and a habit of hesitating before he answered a question and of waiting a beat between sentences made me curious.

Neil McCallum and his dog, a black bouvier who looked like a young bear, were waiting for me on the front lawn of his house. Neil was a little below medium height and stocky. He was wearing blue jeans, a green open-necked sweater, and a Saskatchewan Roughriders ball cap. Up close, I saw that the hair under his ball cap was brown and that he had the small almond-shaped eyes and distinctive mouth of a person with Down syndrome.

He watched as I got out of the car. Finally he took a step towards me. “You’re Joanne,” he said.

“And you’re Neil.” The bouvier was watching me intently. I walked over and held my hand out, palm up, for it to sniff. “What’s your dog’s name?” I asked.

“Chloe,” Neil said. “A French name.”

Chloe came over and nuzzled me, and I knelt down and stroked her back. “She’s beautiful,” I said.

For the first time since I’d arrived, Neil McCallum smiled. “I’m going to breed her pretty soon. I’ll have puppies at the end of summer.”

“Are you going to keep them?”

“Mum says one bouvier is enough. I’m going to sell them. To good homes.”

“I always thought that breeding dogs would be a nice job.”

He smiled mischievously. “If you breed dogs, you have to have another job. To pay for your dogs.”

“I’ll remember that,” I said. “What’s your other job?”

“I have three jobs,” he said. “When it’s winter, I help at the concession stand at the curling rink. I take care of the ice, too. When it’s summer, I help at the concession stand at the ball diamond.”

“Must keep you pretty busy.”

“Busy’s good,” he said. “Let’s look at Kellee’s house.”

Neil and Chloe started up the walk between his house and Kellee’s, and I followed. The bungalows were almost identical: mid-sized, with white siding, shining windows, and well-kept grounds. On the face of each house were three wooden butterflies, poised as if for flight.

Neil pulled out a key-ring and opened Kellee’s front door. The house had a slightly stale closed-up smell, but the living room was pleasant: uncluttered and filled with sunshine. There was a couch on the far wall, a couple of comfortable-looking chairs by the front window, and a television set in the corner. On top of the television were two framed
pictures. Neil McCallum picked one up and handed it to me. “That’s Kellee’s parents.”

The photograph had been professionally taken by one of those companies that set up in department stores and malls and offer great prices and your choice of three possible backgrounds. Kellee’s parents had chosen spring in the Rockies. As they stood against the cardboard range of improbably pink-hued mountains, the Savages’ smiles were open and their eyes were as grey and without illusion as a Saskatchewan winter sky. Good country people.

“Kellee’s parents didn’t have any other children?”

“Just her.” Neil put the family photo back carefully in its place on the television, and handed me the other picture. “That’s Kellee graduating from Indian Head High School. I went there too, but in a different class. I have Down syndrome.”

“You seem to be having a pretty good life.”

He shook his head. “Not any more. I’m too worried. My mum says Kellee’s just busy. I don’t think so. Something’s wrong.” Without explanation, he turned and walked away. After a second’s hesitation, I followed him past the entrance-way and down a hall that seemed to lead to the bedrooms. Neil stopped in front of the only room with a closed door. The door had a lock, and he pulled out his key-ring and opened it. “Look,” he said.

The room was unnaturally dark. When Neil turned on the light, I saw that thick drapes were pulled tightly across the only window. Someone had pushed an old oak filing cabinet and a heavy bookcase in front of the drapes. The result looked less like a decorating decision than a barricade. Flush against the wall to the left of me was the kind of computer table offices use; on top of it were a computer and a printer. Both were state-of-the-art, and both were pricey. To the right of the
table was a small metal bookcase. It had three shelves of books, all with Library of Congress numbers on their spines. One shelf contained books I recognized as the reference texts Kellee had used in her essay on how the alternative press had been used to voice the concerns of prostitutes in our city’s core area. A second shelf held books on the dynamics of groups, and the third held journals from the J-school library; all of them seemed to focus on the subject of journalistic ethics. Thinking of how old Giv Mewhort would have chortled at that oxymoron, I smiled to myself. I leafed through a couple of the J-school journals, hoping for a bonanza: a bus schedule or travel itinerary. All I could see were yellow Post-it notes marking various case studies and articles.