Kaleidoscope
Other Joanne Kilbourn Mysteries
by Gail Bowen
Deadly Appearances
Murder at the Mendel
The Wandering Soul Murders
A Colder Kind of Death
A Killing Spring
Verdict in Blood
Burying Ariel
The Glass Coffin
The Last Good Day
The Endless Knot
The Brutal Heart
The Nesting Dolls
Copyright © 2012 by Gail Bowen
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Bowen, Gail, 1942–
Kaleidoscope : a Joanne Kilbourn mystery / Gail Bowen.
eISBN: 978-0-7710-1666-0
I. Title.
PS8553.08995K35 2012 C813.′54 C2011-906531-2
We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.
Published simultaneously in the United States of America by McClelland & Stewart Ltd., P.O. Box 1030, Plattsburgh, New York 12901
Library of Congress Control Number: 2011938747
Cover art: © Domen Colja S.p. |
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For my friend, Marjorie Gerwing,
With thanks for over two decades of great conversation
Contents
CHAPTER
1
On the afternoon I retired from our university’s political science department I dreamed of my first husband. It was a strange dream; in fact, it was strange that I dreamed of Ian at all. He had been dead for fifteen years. My time of wrestling with grief was long over. I had remarried, and I was deeply in love with my new husband. I was leaving the university with few regrets, memories that were mostly good, and a buoyant sense of possibilities.
Spring that year had been warm and rainy – tropical weather for a prairie province. Trees were in full leaf, lawns were lush and green, bushes and plants were flowering. The air was heavy with the scent of lilacs and wet earth. A Mediterranean languor, enervating but soothing, had settled on our city. It was a good day to retire.
I arrived home at a little after two-thirty. My husband, Zack, a trial lawyer, was in court. Our fourteen-year-old daughter, Taylor, the last of my children who still lived at home, had surprised me by appearing at my retirement lunch and was now back at school, studying for end-of-year exams. Our dogs, Willie and Pantera, were waiting at the
front door. I bent to give them head pats. “Just me,” I said. “Get used to it because the three of us are going to be spending a lot of time together from now on.”
I checked the mail, poured myself a glass of iced tea, and went out to the yard. A half-dozen Halos, my favourite Martha Washington geraniums, were waiting to be planted in a spot by the fence that Zack and I decided could use a splash of colour. Dark red and rimmed with silver, the Halos would be just the touch we needed from the summer palette, but I had larger plans. I positioned one of the lounges so that it would catch the sun, lay down, closed my eyes, and drifted off. And then, on that June afternoon, green with promise, I dreamed of Ian.
My dream was not elegiac. I was in the kitchen of a church basement, pulling steaming roasting pans of cabbage rolls out of an oven. No matter how many pans I pulled out, there was always another one. I was running out of space on the counters. I was hot and I was angry. Over an ancient
PA
system I could hear Ian talking about building a better world. I was only half listening because I’d written the speech, and I’d heard him deliver it a dozen times, but when he stumbled, I gave the disembodied voice my full attention. I waited as he searched for words. When they continued to elude him, I slapped down the pan I was holding. “Damn it, Ian, you know I finish every speech with the same sentence: ‘Security for any one of us lies in greater abundance for all of us.’ ” Ian’s disembodied voice repeated the words, and I woke up.
When I opened my eyes, my husband, Zack, was beside me in his wheelchair. As always when he came straight from work, he looked like an ad in
GQ
– a lightweight taupe linen suit, a matching shirt, and a lime-and-pink-striped silk tie that I particularly liked. He smoothed my hair. “You’re hot,” he said.
“You’re hotter,” I said. “You are such a good-looking guy. How long have you been sitting there?”
“Long enough to worry that you might be getting too much sun, but you were smiling, so I didn’t want to interrupt your dream.”
“My dream wasn’t that great,” I said. “Just one of those frustration things. I was smiling because I realized that all those cabbage rolls I was supposed to find a place for were a little joke from my unconscious.”
Zack raised an eyebrow. “You’re going to have to explain the cabbage rolls.”
I sat up and sipped my iced tea. “I was dreaming about Ian,” I said. “I hardly ever think of him any more, but I guess he was on my mind because today was my last day at the university.”
“Another goodbye?” Zack said.
“Something like that. Anyway, even in my dream, Ian was just a voice making political promises at a rally while I was in the kitchen of some church basement doing a slow burn.”
“Carl Jung says that a dream is a message,” Zack said. “You have to treat it the way you’d treat an unfamiliar object – turn it over and over until you understand its purpose.”
I took another sip of my sun-warm iced tea and looked hard at my husband. “You know the most surprising things.”
“I’m a trial lawyer. Knowing things is my business. So what do you think your dream meant?”
I shrugged. “Beats me. Probably that whatever I choose to do next shouldn’t involve cabbage rolls.”
Zack’s voice was warm and intimate. “You must have known that thirty years ago. You’ve always been smart enough to be the one making the speeches.”
“Maybe, but Ian was the one who was running for office. I was home with the kids, writing speeches, organizing coffee parties, and being a good political wife.”
“You sound as if you’re still doing that slow burn.”
“I’m not. When I think about that time, the only feeling I have is remorse. That’s probably why I don’t talk about Ian very much. He was thirty-seven when he died – too young, and he and I had a lot of unfinished business. Your pal Carl Jung says that dreams lead us to deep inner truths. But I always knew the truth about Ian and me. We loved each other, but we had problems – at least I did.”
“And Ian didn’t.”
“To be fair, he was just too busy to notice. Everything happened so fast: the move to Saskatchewan, Mieka’s birth, the election win, and then suddenly our party was running the province.”
Zack chuckled. “I remember seeing the new premier on the news just after he was sworn in, asking a reporter where the men’s room was.”
I smiled at the memory. “The new premier was livid that they ran that tape. Anyway, after Ian became Attorney General, he was never home.”
“And you were.”
I nodded. “When Ian and I were married, we promised each other we were going to be like D.H. Lawrence’s twin stars, ‘revolving in never coinciding orbits.’ But after that first election night, there was only room for one shooting star. Ian was it, so I became the stargazer.” My voice caught. I took a breath and finished. “And that’s the way it was until he died.”
Zack leaned towards me and took my hand. “Let’s go inside and have a drink and a smooch,” he said.
“You always know exactly what I need.”
“Maybe that’s because it’s always exactly what I need.”
I pulled a stool up to the counter so I could watch Zack make our drinks. As he did with everything, he brought
total concentration to the process of mixing Bombay Sapphire and Martini & Rossi. Zack is a handsome man – balding, heavy-browed with an actor’s large features, a vertical fold in his right cheek, a full-lipped, sensuous mouth, and extraordinary eyes, green flecked with brown. He lined up his mixing glasses, jiggers, and the gin and vermouth and began. When the drinks were ready, he removed our martini glasses from the freezer, filled them, dropped in a curl of lemon, and handed me my glass.
“This seems like an occasion for a toast,” he said. “What would you like to drink to, Ms. Shreve?”
“How about dreams – past, present, and future?” I said.
Zack grinned. “Very Jungian.”
We touched glasses. “You never tell me about your dreams,” I said.
“You don’t want to know,” he said. “They’re mostly triple X.”
“That explains all that midnight groping.”
“Any port in a storm,” he said cheerfully. His face grew pensive. “You know something weird, Jo? In my dreams, I’m not in the wheelchair. You and I are walking or doing dishes or dancing and my wheelchair is nowhere to be seen. I haven’t walked in forty-four years, but in my dreams I have a fully functioning body.” His eyes met mine. “Then I wake up, and there’s the chair.”
“Does it bother you?”
“No. That wheelchair is just part of my life, and I have a great life. We’re lucky people.”
“And we’re smart enough to know we’re lucky,” I said. “A double gift – and now I have all the time in the world to be grateful.”
“No second thoughts about leaving the university?”
“Not a one.”
“So how was your retirement lunch?”
“Exactly the same as every other retirement lunch at the Faculty Club. Good food. Bad speeches. Everyone checking their watches to see how much longer they had to stay. Hey, one nice thing – the kids were all represented. Mieka read a funny e-mail Angus sent from Calgary. Peter brought Taylor and they both said a few words. Then our granddaughters sang ‘Frère Jacques’ in a round until Mieka gave them the hook.”
