A Colder Kind of Death (12 page)

“Maybe she thought you were just satisfying your curiosity,” I said.

Hilda shook her head. “No, I explained at the outset that my interest in Maureen Gault was not whimsical, and that a dear friend’s life had been thrown into turmoil because of Maureen. Carolyn reacted oddly to that. She laughed, not a nice laugh. Then she said, ‘I wonder how many lives were thrown into turmoil by that girl?’

“I thought I would press my advantage then. I asked Carolyn straight out if she believed Maureen Gault was capable of murder. There was such a long silence on the line, I wondered if she’d hung up on me. But finally Carolyn said, ‘Maureen Gault was capable of anything. She was pathological.’ ”

“It sounds as if Carolyn’s worth talking to,” I said.

Hilda said, “It won’t be easy. Joanne. From the minute I mentioned Maureen’s name, Carolyn Atcheson sounded as if she was terrified.”

“But Maureen’s dead,” I said. “What could Carolyn Atcheson be frightened of?”

Hilda stood up. “That’s what I’m going to find out. First thing tomorrow morning, I’m driving down to Chaplin.”

“What about church?” I asked. “I’ve never known you to miss.”

Hilda folded the newspaper carefully. “I think sometimes God likes action from his foot soldiers.”

I looked at my watch. “Speaking of action, I’d better get supper started. How does spaghetti sound to you?”

“Splendid,” Hilda said.

“Good,” I said. For the next hour, I chopped, sautéed, stirred, simmered, and thought about the best way of finding
out the truth. “Follow the strands back to the place where they meet.” That’s what Hilda had said. Jill was looking into Kevin’s life; Hilda had taken on Maureen. That left Ian, and no one was going to follow that strand back but me.

Just as I moved the spaghetti sauce to the back burner, Jess and Taylor came in from outdoors, cheeks rosy with cold and excitement.

“It smells like Geno’s in here,” Taylor said.

Jess turned to her. “Do you ever go there on Kids’ Night?”

Taylor shook her head. “Jo says she’d rather be pecked to death by a duck. We just go regular nights.”

Jess smiled at me. I could see the edge of a permanent tooth pushing through. I bent down and looked more closely.

“Nice tooth, Jess.”

“Thanks. Mrs. Kilbourn, do you have hot chocolate here?”

“Yes,” I said, “I think we do.”

Five minutes later, we were all sitting around the kitchen table, drinking hot chocolate and listening to Taylor talk about how, if she had a kitten, she would let it sleep on the pillow beside her so it wouldn’t bother me in the night. Life in the fast lane.

When Hilda came down, she was dressed to go out.

“Want to join us?” I asked.

“Thank you, no,” she said. “I’m off to Ray-elle’s Beauty Salon.”

“Thinking of getting a new ’do?” said Jess.

Hilda patted her red hair with a degree of satisfaction. “Oh, I think my old ’do will suffice.”

“I like it,” Taylor said. “In oil paints that colour is called ‘raw sienna.’ It’s one of my favourites.”

“Mine too,” said Hilda.

Gary Stephens was an hour late picking up Jess. He’d called in mid-afternoon to say he’d be at our house by 5:00,
but it was close to 6:00 when he pulled into the driveway.

“Sorry I’m late,” he said. “The skiing was just too good.” He was wearing cross-country ski clothes, and I saw his skis on the rack of his car, but he didn’t radiate the sense of physical well-being of someone who’d spent the afternoon outdoors. As he stood in the hall, his handsome face was pale, and he smelled, not of fresh air, but of liquor and cologne. I wondered who the lucky woman was this time.

“It wasn’t a problem,” I said. “The kids had a great afternoon. They built a snow fort. Jess could have stayed for supper if he’d wanted.”

“Thanks, babe, but Sylvie has something planned.” He smiled his slow, lazy, practised smile. “You know how she is,” he said.

You and me against the little woman
. It was an ugly tactic, but before I had a chance to respond, Jess was in the hall.

“Dad, you’ve gotta see the fort we built. Come on. We made forty-six snowballs.”

As Jess grabbed his father’s hand, Gary Stephens was transformed as he had been Hallowe’en night. There was such naked love in his eyes as he looked at his son that I felt a rush of feeling towards him. Five minutes before I’d wanted to come down on him like a fist on a grasshopper, but he was a complex man, and he evoked complex emotions.

Angus and I were just finishing the salad when Hilda came in.

I checked her hair. “No new ’do?” I asked.

“No,” she said, as she hung up her coat. “But I did come away with some interesting new perspectives on Maureen.”

“From whom?” I asked.

“From Ray-elle herself. Joanne, Maureen did not work at Ray-elle’s at the time of her death. Ray-elle had, and I quote, ‘canned her’ the last week in October.”

“But the paper said …”

“Ray-elle didn’t believe there was much to be gained in giving the newspaper the complete story. She reasoned that since Maureen was dead and Shirley Gault was suffering enough, there was no need to dig up the past.”

“I guess that makes sense,” I said.

“There’s more,” Hilda said. “And this doesn’t make sense. At least not to me. The day after Kevin Tarpley died, Maureen Gault came by the beauty shop and offered to buy Ray-elle out.”

“Where would Maureen get that kind of money?”

Hilda came over and took a slice of cucumber out of the salad bowl. “I don’t know, but apparently she said she could pay cash. Joanne, the asking price for that business would be significant. Ray-elle told me she had just finished renovating.” A smile flickered at the corners of Hilda’s mouth.

“What’s so funny?” I asked.

Hilda shook her head. “That place. Joanne, everything in Ray-elle’s is pink. Floor, walls, chairs, uniforms, everything.”

“Maybe Ray-elle had Superstar Barbie’s decorator,” I said.

Taylor, who was setting the table, heard a name that interested her. “I saw a lady on TV who had nineteen operations so she could look like Barbie,” she said.

“Good lord,” I said, “why would she do that?”

Angus handed me the salad. “You don’t want to know, Mum,” he said. “How long till we eat?”

“Not long,” I said. “The pasta has to cook.”

“Time enough to see my snow fort,” T said.

“I had to ask,” said Angus, as he followed his sister out the back door.

I turned to Hilda. “How about some Chianti while you tell me what you found out.”

I poured each of us a glass. Hilda took hers and raised it. “To puzzle solving,” she said. “Although, to be frank, my
visit to Ray-elle’s has yielded more questions than answers.” Hilda sipped her wine. “Joanne, let me practise what I preach and put some chronology to all this.

“When I got to the shop, Ray-elle was at the appointments desk and Cheryl, a young woman who plays a pivotal role in this story, was sweeping up. There weren’t any customers. I introduced myself, and Ray-elle said she was just about to close anyway and she asked Cheryl to get me some coffee. When Ray-elle was finished, she told Cheryl she could leave, and Ray-elle and I went to a little room at the back, so she could smoke. Joanne, even her lighter was pink. It was in a kind of sheath made of pink leather, and the case she kept her cigarettes in was covered in pink leather, too.”

“I used to have a cigarette case like that,” I said, “except mine was white. I haven’t seen a set like that in twenty-five years. I take it Ray-elle is, as the French say, ‘of a certain age.’ ”

“She is,” Hilda agreed. “And of a certain type. I liked her, Joanne. She’s a school-of-hard-knocks person, physically strong and experienced. To look at her, one would think there wouldn’t be much in life that would intimidate her …”

“But something did,” I said.

“Not something, Joanne. Someone. The first thing Rayelle said to me after we sat down was that she wasn’t sorry Maureen Gault was dead because Maureen scared the shit out of her.” Hilda raised an eyebrow. “You do realize I’m giving you Ray-elle’s words verbatim.”

“I do,” I said. “Now, what did Maureen do to Ray-elle to scare her so badly?”

“It’s an ugly story,” Hilda said. “Cheryl, the girl who was sweeping up when I arrived at the shop, is a person with some serious limitations intellectually. She does odd jobs around the shop, sweeps up, cleans brushes and combs, that sort of thing. But Ray-elle has her wash hair, too. She says Cheryl has a gentle touch, and the customers like her.”
Hilda smiled. “Cheryl really did seem like a pleasant young woman. At any rate, last month, Cheryl came to Ray-elle and told her Maureen was forcing her to hand over her tips. It didn’t amount to much, and when Ray-elle confronted her, Maureen said she didn’t need the money.”

“Why did she do it then?”

Hilda’s face was grave. “Ray-elle said that Maureen seemed to get her kicks just from making the girl do her bidding.”

“What did Maureen do when she was fired?” I asked.

Hilda picked up the wine bottle and filled our glasses. “She laughed in Ray-elle’s face. Said she didn’t need to work anyway, because she was about to come into some major money.” Hilda looked hard at me. “It wasn’t braggadocio, Joanne. The day after Kevin Tarpley died, Maureen paid a farewell visit to Ray-elle’s. According to Ray-elle, Maureen was dressed expensively and ostentatiously. She said something cruel to Cheryl, queened it over the other women who work in the shop, then she went over to Ray-elle and offered to buy the shop. She said she could pay cash. When Ray-elle told her to get out, Maureen turned ugly. She said, ‘Like I would ever want to buy a dump like this.’ Then she picked up an open bottle of peroxide solution and threw it in Ray-elle’s face. Ray-elle still has a nasty burn.”

“Did she go to the police?”

Hilda shook her head. “She was afraid to, Joanne. She said she was afraid of what Maureen Gault would do if she crossed her.”

That night I couldn’t sleep. Every time I closed my eyes, Maureen Gault was there. Finally, I gave up, went downstairs, and made myself some warm milk. As I sat at the kitchen table with my mug, Rose came into the room and sat with me; in Rose’s house, people didn’t come down for warm milk in the middle of the night.

From the kitchen window, I could see the ice on the creek.
In the November moonlight, it looked dark and sinister. A child had drowned in that creek. When they had searched for the body, the police had brought up all kinds of ugliness: stolen bicycles and grocery carts; empty whiskey bottles and used condoms; a weighted gunny sack full of small skeletons that turned out to be feline.

That afternoon, when I was certain the child’s body had been taken away, I had walked along the levee. The banks of the creek were still littered with the objects the police had dredged up. Until that morning, those objects had been part of the tenebrous life of the creekbed. In the pale spring light, they had looked both mean and alien and I had hurried from them.

I rinsed my mug, put it in the dishwasher, and turned out the kitchen light. I had to get some sleep. In the morning it would be my turn to dredge.

I didn’t want to remember the last hours I spent with my husband on the day of his death. The morning of December 27 was cruel in every sense: the weather was viciously cold, and, the night before, Ian had come in very late and we had quarrelled. We weren’t people who fought often and, as Ian got ready to leave that morning, we were silent, stunned, I think, by the pall of bitterness that hung in the air between us. I kissed my husband as he left, but I didn’t tell him I loved him, and I didn’t say goodbye. I was angry at him for deciding to drive through a blizzard because he felt he had to honour the outcome of a stupid coin toss, and I was angry at him because I thought he had treated me badly at the caucus office party the night before.

That party had seem jinxed from the beginning. The idea had been a good one: an afternoon of skating and tobogganing in Wascana Park for the families of members and staff who were in town for the holidays, then, in the evening, Boxing Day drinks in the east wing for the adults. But the wind had howled all afternoon, and most of us with children stayed away. After lunch, Ian had gone over to his office to
get caught up on his mail, and he had called before dinner to say he wouldn’t be home, and that I should come straight to the party and he’d see me there. As I was dressing, Angus came into our bedroom and threw up. I felt his head. He was feverish, but not worryingly so. I cleaned up, gave him a bath and some children’s Tylenol, and called Ian at the office to tell him I wasn’t coming. There was no answer. By the time Angus got out of the tub, he seemed better. Mieka was babysitting her brothers, and the party was only a few blocks away at the Legislature, so I decided to go after all.

It was a fine night. The wind had died down, and the air was clear and cold. The evergreens in front of the Legislature were strung, as they always were, with blue and white lights, but that year the park commission had suspended a giant illuminated snowflake over the face of the old building. It was sensational, and as I walked past the pictures of our former premiers and heard the music drifting down the marble corridors, I thought that one last Christmas party wasn’t such a bad idea after all.

My merry mood didn’t last long. The stately old Opposition Caucus Room was full of people, but Ian wasn’t one of them. I got a drink and went over to Ian’s secretary, Lorraine Bellegarde. She was wearing a red and yellow Métis ribbon shirt and a fringed leather skirt; it was a festive outfit, but Lorraine did not look cheerful. I didn’t have to ask why. Lorraine was a perfectionist, and she’d been in charge of the festivities that day. I knew her well enough to know how acutely she’d be feeling the weight of the afternoon’s failure. She told me she hadn’t seen Ian. She also told me not to worry, but it was too late for that. I started moving around the room, asking if anyone had seen my husband. No one had, and the terrible possibilities began their assault on my consciousness: a holiday accident; a heart attack; a fatal slip on an icy step. By the time Ian walked through the door I was
half sick with worry. He looked weary and preoccupied, but I didn’t pity him.