A Cold White Sun: A Constable Molly Smith Mystery (Constable Molly Smith Series) (16 page)

“Okay,” he said, and she felt a twinge of guilt at the lie.

“Tomorrow?”

“No can do. Sorry.” The bus approached. The line-up was long and everyone shuffled a few inches forward.

“I want to see you again, Molly. Soon. You name a time.”

“Thursday. One o’clock?”

“Why don’t I pick you up? No point in bringing two cars. Where do you live?”

The bus pulled to a halt. No one got off, and people climbed aboard, weighed down with skis and boots, backpacks, and overstimulated children.

“I’ll meet you here. Lift at one.”

“Can I have your phone number?”

But it was her turn to clamber onto the bus, and she left Tony with only a wave.

Chapter Nineteen

Her son. Her baby boy. Jackson.

Not a day had passed in the last forty-five years that Margo Franklin hadn’t thought about Jackson. On her wedding day, she looked over the smiling congregation and imagined Jackson sitting in the front row, proud of his role as ring bearer. As she lay in the hospital bed cradling her newborn children in her arms, she wondered if Jackson had any adoptive brothers or sisters. When she went to the children’s school to meet with their teachers or to soccer games to stand on the sidelines and cheer she hoped Jackson was getting a good education.

She rarely, if ever, talked about him. About her boy, stolen from her. Steve didn’t want to hear it, and she’d soon come to realize that few people had any understanding. She’d been told more than once to “get over it.”

She’d tried finding him using official channels. Everything had failed.

Jackson had disappeared from her life.

Until now. Now, he was back.

Margo enjoyed working at the art gallery. She’d trained as a typist and stenographer, started out at the bottom of the ladder in the typing pool at an insurance company. She’d taken a few years off to have the kids, but had been hired back when Ellen, her youngest, started school. She’d gradually climbed the ladder to personal assistant for a series of vice-presidents. She and Steve had retired with good pensions last year, when they both reached sixty. Looking to get out of the hustle and bustle of the city, they’d moved to Trafalgar a few months ago. Margo soon decided retirement wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. Long boring days, particularly in the winter when she couldn’t get into the garden; Steve underfoot all day.

This job was perfect. It was easy and the hours were relaxed. She enjoyed meeting the customers, and although
she knew
little about art she did think she had good taste and loved talking about it.

The job didn’t pay well, and truth be told Margo spent all of her earnings (probably far more than she earned) on clothes and jewelry. She’d always thought she dressed well, but since working alongside Eliza Winters, Margo found her own long-suffering secretary and retired-housewife clothes drab and, dare she say it, dowdy.

Eliza was an easy boss; Margo got the impression she didn’t take the art gallery all that seriously. She could be a mite aloof, even cold sometimes, but Margo was sure she’d break down Eliza’s defenses soon enough. She’d been a famous supermodel once, no doubt she was used to not trusting people until she got to know them.

Today, for the first time Eliza suggested they do something outside a formal boss-to-employee relationship. Margo was delighted, and she leapt at the chance to talk about Jackson. “Let’s go for a drink, why don’t we? Do you have time? I’ll call Steve, tell him I’m going to be late. He worries you know. After that horrible murder, I guess everyone’s looking over their shoulder these days.”

She made her call and they set off. The Hudson House Hotel was but a half a block downhill from the shop. Eliza led the way to the comfortable lounge. The bar was filling up with skiers, but the women found a two-person table tucked into a small alcove where they could speak in some degree of privacy.

The waitress arrived promptly and asked if they wanted menus. “No, thank you,” Eliza said. “We won’t be long. I’ll have a Pinot Grigio, please. Margo?”

“Pinot Grigio? What’s that? Is it nice?”

“It’s a light white wine. Italian.”

“I’ll have that too.” It sounded so sophisticated.

Young people were pouring in, laughing and slapping backs, shedding snow, pulling off gloves, cheeks ruddy with cold, faces exhilarated with the pure pleasure of being young and healthy.

Margo wondered if Jackson skied. He must, she’d seen him in Mid-Kootenay Adventure Vacations checking out the equipment on sale.

She hesitated, momentarily afraid to tell her story. Afraid Eliza would judge her. Judge her and condemn her. She saw Eliza glancing around the room, as if she were trying to find someone more interesting to talk to.

“I had a baby when I was sixteen,” Margo blurted. She’d meant to start slowly, build up her story gradually, like stepping into lake water at the beginning of the summer. Instead, she found herself leaping straight off the dock.

“I named him Jackson. His father’s name was Jack. I loved Jack, and he loved me, despite the age difference. But we couldn’t be together. He was married you see, a good Catholic family man. Jack owned the drug store in our town, and I worked there part time.”

Coasters and two glasses of wine appeared on the table. Margo picked up her glass. She remembered.

When she told Jack she was pregnant, he said no one must know. He swore her to secrecy.

Margo’s family didn’t have much money. Her dad worked at the sawmill and her mom stayed home. Margo was the oldest of six kids. She’d been so frightened, terrified to tell them she was pregnant.

With good reason.

Her mother found her throwing up in the toilet one morning. She looked at Margo as if she were a breeding cow, studying the enlarged breasts visible underneath the thin nightgown. “My worst fears have come to pass,” she declared.

From then on, Margo wasn’t permitted to sit at the dinner table with the family anymore. She had to take her meals in her room. Her dad said she disgusted him so much he couldn’t keep his food down.

He told the other children she was a bad person, and they weren’t to have anything to do with her. Margo’s sister, Joanie, came to her room to show Margo her new doll. Their father snatched it up. Threw it into the stove, stuffed it into the flames with the poker. He said the doll was going to hell and Margo was going there too.

For many nights after Margo could hear her sister screaming in her sleep, having nightmares. But she couldn’t go to Joanie’s room. She couldn’t comfort her. They wouldn’t let her.

“Of course, I had to stop going to school as soon as my parents found out about the pregnancy,” she said to Eliza. “Soon after that I left home. I remember that day, so well. Almost as well as I remember Jackson’s birth. It was a Saturday, and Dad had taken all the kids into town to see a movie. A movie was a big treat in our family.” By this time Margo had known not to even hope she’d be allowed to go with them. She wasn’t good enough to get any favors. She was a disgrace to the family. She sat in her room, by herself, all day long. She was allowed out only to go to the bathroom and she was forbidden from speaking to her brothers and sisters. She shared a bed with Mary, the next sister down, and Dad told Mary not to talk to Margo. They gave Mary Margo’s nicest clothes, not that she had much, said she didn’t need them anymore. Mom brought in her meals on a tray. Burned potatoes and fatty bits of meat, what the others didn’t want. She said the only reason they were feeding Margo at all was because the precious baby didn’t deserve to starve because of Margo’s evil.

Evil. Her own mother had believed she was evil.

Many years passed before Margo, with the love of Steve and their kids, began to finally understand that she was as valuable, and as flawed, as any other person on earth.

“They asked me who’d gotten me pregnant. My dad hit me, kicked me so hard my mom yelled at him to stop, when I wouldn’t tell. I never did tell.”

“A girl in my class went to stay with an aunt,” Eliza said. She laid her hands on the table, twisting the stem of her wine glass between her long fingers, and focused her green eyes on Margo’s face. “Everyone knew what that meant. When she came back she’d changed. She’d been a fun-loving girl before, now she was quiet, withdrawn. Sad. She never spoke of what had happened to her when she’d been away. We knew she’d had a baby, but we couldn’t ask and she couldn’t tell. We stayed away from her, even those who’d been her friends. It was as though she’d had the plague, and we were all in danger if we got too close.”

“Yes,” Margo said. “A disease so powerful it made parents hate their daughters. Turn from them and never want to see them again.”

Lately two new words had begun to creep into Canadian consciousness. Honor killing. Murdering a daughter who’d been raped or gotten pregnant for the sake of the family’s supposed honor.

Margo’s parents hadn’t killed her.

She sometimes wondered if that were only because their society hadn’t given them permission to do so.

“Once everyone had gone to the movie, my mother told me to pack my things. I could take what would fit into one suitcase, nothing else. My uncle Pete came to get me. He drove me to the bus stop, leering at me the whole way. He wanted to know how it happened. He asked me if I’d liked it. What position I’d been in. He said my breasts were getting big, and he wanted a squeeze. A few years later, when I could think about that day clearly, I realized Pete, my mother’s brother, had an erection the entire time we were in the car.

“My mother had given me money for bus fare to the city and a piece of paper with the name of a home for unwed mothers. She had not said goodbye. She had not come outside with me to wait for Uncle Pete.”

Eliza dug in her purse for a tissue. She was crying now. They were both crying. The glasses of wine sat untouched on the table between them. The buzz of conversation from the bar had faded to white noise.

Margo never went back to her hometown and never saw her parents again. She didn’t even attend their funerals. Once Joanie had grown up she sought, and found, Margo. Joanie was married now, to a nice man. They lived in Toronto, in a comfortable house with three cats, too much furniture, and a big garden. No kids though. Margo and Steve had spent a delightful Christmas with them the previous year.

“I stayed in a home for unwed mothers in the city,” Margo said, and even after all these years, she shuddered.

It had been almost dark when the bus pulled in. Margo didn’t know the way to this place where she was supposed to go. She didn’t have a map, and her mother hadn’t given her money for a cab. She had one cheap suitcase and a baby in her belly. She asked directions from the woman behind the ticket counter, who sneered as she eyed Margo up and down before telling her where to find the home.

It wasn’t far. No doubt they put the home near the bus station on purpose, for all the disposable girls.

“It was during that walk,” Margo said, “through the dark streets of the strange city, when I vowed I’d do anything for this baby. It would be him and me together against the world. Indivisible. Forever.”

“Obviously, it didn’t work out that way.”

“No. That home.” Margo took a breath. “If there’s a hell on earth it was that place. I went back a few years ago. A sudden impulse. Steve was away on a fishing trip and I found myself buying a plane ticket. There and back in one day. I didn’t want to spend the night. Before I knew what was happening, I’d rented a car and driven to the bus station. It’s still there, seedier and more run down than I remember. I found where the home had been. It’s gone now, replaced by a modern office building. I expected to find a bottomless black hole steaming sulfur where nothing green and living can grow.”

“Do you keep in touch with any of the women you met there?”

Margo shook her head. “There’s an online support group of girls who’d been there. I haven’t joined. I can’t face hearing their stories. I’ve heard talk about suing the organizations that ran those homes, but I don’t care. If I could turn back the clock and have them be nice and kind, I would, but what’s over is over. I don’t need, or want, any money from them. Or their forced apologies.”

“What happened to you there?”

Margo clung to Eliza’s hand as if in a vice. Eliza did not try to pull away.

“They didn’t beat us or starve us, but they made sure we knew we were disgusting, filthy creatures, not fit to live among decent churchgoing folk. We didn’t even use our real names. They told me when I arrived my name would be Ruth. And that was that. We slept in a top floor dormitory, on narrow hard beds with little in the way of blankets. It was cold, so cold. I was there over a Prairie winter, and that might be what I remember the most. The cold. I’d left home at the end of summer, and hadn’t thought to pack winter clothes. All they gave us to wear were loose maternity dresses, when our own clothes didn’t fit any more. We worked hard, cooking, cleaning, laundry, mending. I never left the home. Not once was I allowed to go for a walk, to get a breath of fresh air. Some of the girls wanted to write home to their families, send letters. That wasn’t allowed.

“They told me not one single thing about how the pregnancy would advance, what would happen when the baby would be ready to be born. I didn’t even know how he would get out of me. We girls were forbidden to talk about it. We’d have privileges, whatever that meant, taken away if we were found to be engaged in conversation of an indecent nature. All we could do was exchange frightened whispers in the night.”