Murder At The Mendel (22 page)

“Look,” she said finally, “when the wind blows, Nina’s dress and Daddy’s suit look like they’re dancing on the clothesline.”

I smiled and gave her shoulder a squeeze.

“Sally died, you know,” she said conversationally. “I was asleep, but when I woke up, Daddy told me Sally had gone to heaven.”

I didn’t know what to say. I stood there, numb, looking into the yard, my hand resting on Taylor’s shoulder. The wind had picked up, and Taylor was right. Nina’s dress and Stu’s tuxedo looked as if they were dancing. Inexplicably, I felt a clutch of panic.

But suddenly behind me there was Nina’s voice, warm, reassuring. “Come and eat something, you two.” And I felt safe again. She was sitting at the dining-room table in a pose I’d seen a thousand times: a tray set with the thinnest cups, a teapot, plates, linen napkins, something still warm from the oven for tea.

Izaak Levin was not mentioned again that morning. As Nina talked quietly about the kinds of birds that would come to their bird feeder when the great migrations north began, I saw that she was trying to protect Taylor and Stuart by enclosing them in a world of familiar pleasures. There was no place for Sally’s murderer at that table, and so we talked of birds and gardens and Stuart’s summer home at Stay Away Lake, a hundred miles north of the city. Stuart wanted to go there after everything was settled, Nina said in her soft voice. He loved the house at Stay Away Lake. His family had owned it since before he was born, and everything was exactly as it had been half a century ago.

“He needs that now,” said Nina. “So much has changed.”

“So much has changed.” I repeated those words to myself as I started the long walk to Osler Street. I didn’t even make it to the bridge before the tears started. I didn’t care. I stood and looked down at the river and cried. When I was finished, I took a deep breath, squared my shoulders and started to walk again. The sky was overcast but the air was fresh, and when I turned up the back alley toward our house, I was
feeling in control. My neighbour was out in her backyard taking sheets off the line. The sheets were frozen, and she had to wrestle with them to get them folded and in her laundry hamper. I thought of Nina’s evening dress and Stuart’s tuxedo dancing against the grey February sky. And then out of nowhere, a poem, something we used to write in autograph books when I was in grade school:

I love you. I love you. I love you almighty.

I wish your pyjamas were next to my nightie.

Now don’t get excited.

Now don’t lose your head.

I mean on the clothesline and not in the bed.

When I walked across our backyard, I couldn’t tell if I was laughing or crying.

Angus was sitting in the den watching a kids’ show that he’d outgrown years ago. He was wearing a T-shirt he’d bought himself at the joke shop in the mall. On the front a cartoon rooster with a huge beak and a macho leer was strutting on a beach filled with hens; underneath it said, “Chicks Dig Big Peckers.”

I gestured toward the
TV
. “Anything new in Mr. Dressup’s world?”

“Nope, everything’s just the same.” Then he looked up at me. I could see he’d been crying, but he tried a smile. “Nothing ever changes on Mr. Dressup. You know that, Mum. That’s why I’m watching.”

At three o’clock I went over and gave my senior class a reading assignment. There was a message on my desk to call Izaak Levin. I shuddered when I noticed the message was dated the day before.

When I got home, Angus met me at the door. “I’m going down to the Y to shoot baskets with James if it’s okay.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “Supper’s at five-thirty.”

“What are we having?”

“Takeout, your choice.”

“Fish and chips?”

“Sounds good to me,” I said. “I could use a load of grease right now.”

He smiled. “Right. Oh, I almost forgot, Sally’s mother came over with some flowers,” he said. “They’re in the living room.”

On the coffee table was the Japanese porcelain bowl with the painted swimming fish. Serene. Beautiful. Nina had filled it with white anemone, and there was a note card with a line written in her neat backhand propped up against it. “Remembering and cherishing, N.”

I sighed and went to the phone. She answered on the first ring, and when she heard my voice, her relief was evident.

“Jo, thank heavens it’s you. I’m feeling very alone right now. Stuart’s been drinking all day. He’s so withdrawn I can’t reach him. And I think the reality of her mother’s death is starting to hit Taylor. She’s just clinging to me. I haven’t been able to get anything done. You said this morning that if there was anything you could do, I should ask. Well, I’m asking.”

“I’m here,” I said.

“Someone needs to go to the funeral home and make some decisions. And a curious thing. A priest came to the house this afternoon. He said Sally was a parishioner of his. That’s a surprise, at least to me. At any rate, he’ll do the funeral, but he needs to talk to someone from the family.” Her voice broke. “Jo, there is no one from the family. I’m all alone.”

“I’ll go, Nina,” I said. “Just give me the names and addresses.”

“Thank you, Jo. I knew I could count on you.”

When I hung up the phone, I felt about as wretched as I could remember. I put my face in my hands and leaned against the telephone table. After a while, I felt a tap on my shoulder. I looked up. Peter was standing there.

“I have to go and pick out the coffin,” I said.

“You’ll need a ride,” he said simply.

I was glad I had him with me. The people at the funeral home were kind and helpful, but making funeral arrangements was a lousy job. After we finished, Pete dropped me off at St. Thomas More Chapel.

I had called Father Gary Ariano before dinner and told him I’d meet him at eight o’clock. The college bells were chiming when I walked in the front door, and Father Ariano was waiting for me. He was a dark-haired, athletic man in early middle age, very intense. He was wearing blue jeans and a sweatshirt from Loyola University. He held out his hand in greeting, and I followed him up two flights of stairs through a door marked “Private” into the priests’ common room. It was a comfortable room, with an outsize aquarium, a wall of windows that looked out onto the campus and a generously stocked bar.

“What’ll it be?” asked Father Ariano.

“Bourbon, please, and ice.”

Father Ariano opened a Blue for himself and poured a generous splash of Old Grand-Dad over ice for me. We sat down on a couch in front of the windows. It was a foggy night, and below us the lights of the campus glowed, otherworldly.

I didn’t know where to begin but after we’d had a few minutes to grow easy with one another, Father Ariano began for me.

“Sally told me once that the only good things about the Catholic church were its art collection and its funerals.”

“And yet she was a regular communicant?” I asked.

“She was,” he said. “She came most often on weekdays. There’s a mass around five, and sometimes we’d go out for a sandwich after or she’d come up here and we’d talk.”

“It’s hard to think of Sally as devout,” I said.

“I think Sally would have called herself interested rather than devout. The nature of faith and the faithful interested her. She was a very bright woman.”

“Not just a holy innocent the great god of art dripped paint through,” I said.

He smiled. “That sounds like a direct quote from our friend Sally. People always underestimated her. Stuart Lachlan certainly did. He put her in a terrible position when he wrote that book. It was an incredible breach of trust.”

“Not the first in her life,” I said.

He looked at me oddly. “No,” he said, “not the first and not the only. But don’t get me started on that. Look, I guess we’d better discuss the details for the funeral.”

“Right,” I said.

Father Ariano was, as they say, a godsend: factual, presenting options, suggesting choices. When we’d finished, I stood up.

“Thanks,” I said. “I guess that’s it.”

Father Ariano looked at me. “Except for one thing.”

I waited.

He squeezed his right hand together, crushing his beer can. “Except,” he said, “that this is the shits. It really is the shits.”

“That’s what my son said, too.”

“Smart kid,” he said, standing. “Come on, follow me, I’ll show you the chapel.”

We went down the stairs to the main floor, but instead of going toward the front doors, we turned down a wide and brightly lit hall. On one side were pictures of the priests who had been heads of the order. On the other were clothing racks, the kind you see in department stores. Arranged on
each rack, seemingly by ecclesiastical season and size, were dozens of clerical vestments.

“This is where we robe,” Father Ariano said casually, “and here,” he said, as we walked through some double doors, “is where we go to work.”

The air in the chapel was cool and smelled of candle wax, furniture polish and, lingeringly, of wet wool. The chapel was uncluttered and attractive: white painted walls and plain blond pews arranged in a semicircle to face the gleaming wooden cross suspended from the ceiling above the altar. It looked like any of a dozen chapels I’d seen that were designed for the university community at worship. But on the north wall was a mural, and it was to the mural that Gary Ariano directed my attention when we came through the doors.

“There’s our prize,” he said.

From a distance the mural was conventionally pretty: a prairie field on a summer’s day with Christ at the centre performing the miracle of the loaves and fishes. I wasn’t much interested.

“The colours are lovely,” I said dismissively.

Gary Ariano said, “Go closer. Get a good look.”

Up close, the mural glowed with apocalyptic light. Dark storm clouds in the corner menaced the perfect blue of the sky; under the crowds that circled the field where Jesus stood, the earth was cracking open, and arms shaking their fists at God thrust themselves through wounds in the earth.

“That just about reflects my world view at the moment,” I said.

“I knew you’d like it,” said Gary Ariano dryly, as we turned and walked out of the chapel and back into the world.

CHAPTER

12

Sally’s funeral was set for Monday afternoon, the first day of the university’s February break. The administration had introduced the break a quarter of a century before because the university had the highest suicide rate in the country. The students still called it Dead Week. The period between Friday night when I walked home through the darkness from my meeting with Father Gary Ariano to the morning of the funeral was a blur for me: arranging for musicians, choosing the proper spray of flowers for the coffin, the right arrangements for the tall copper vases the college chapel provided, talking to Mieka about food for the reception afterwards –busywork, but anything beat thinking about Sally.

And anything was better than thinking about Izaak Levin. I couldn’t get my mind around the fact that the brilliant man Sally and I had dreamed over that hot, starry summer was a killer. Looking at my reflection in the hall mirror, I saw the same woman I always saw, but I felt like Saint Bartholomew, flayed alive. In desperation, I grabbed my gym bag and went to Maggie’s. The aerobics class was in the same gym Sally and I had been in before Christmas, and she was everywhere
in that room for me, face set in concentration, body slick with sweat, invulnerable. Halfway through the workout, I couldn’t take the memories any more, and I ran to the dressing room and wept.

I talked to Nina many times that weekend but I saw her only once, when Mieka and I went Saturday morning to take Taylor shopping for an outfit she could wear to the services on Monday.

We pulled up in front of the Lachlans’ at nine o’clock. Stuart met us at the door. He looked, as the Irish say, like a man who has spent the night asleep in his own grave, but he helped Taylor on with her coat and walked us out to the road.

When he saw Mieka waiting in her car, Stu looked at me. “Haven’t you replaced your car yet, Joanne?”

I shook my head. “No,” I said, “there doesn’t seem to have been any time.”

Stu fumbled in his pocket and produced a set of keys. “Here,” he said, pointing to the two silvery Mercedes in his driveway. “Take one of them. I’m not going anywhere, and even Nina can’t drive them both at once. Jo, she told me you’re handling everything for us. Keep the car as long as you want. Keep it forever.”

Taylor had already climbed into the front seat of Stuart’s car, so I went to tell Mieka I didn’t need a ride after all. When I slid into the driver’s seat, I smiled at Taylor.

“Okay, miss, let’s go look at some dresses.” It wasn’t until I pulled into a parking place at the mall that it hit me. For the first time since the accident, I had driven a car again.

I was still driving the Mercedes when I pulled up in front of St. Thomas More Chapel an hour before Sally’s funeral. I’d come early because I wanted to make sure everything was perfect.

As I walked into the hushed coolness of the chapel it seemed as if everything was as it should be. A screen was in
place to the side of the altar. Hugh Rankin-Carter was giving the eulogy, and he wanted to show some of Sally’s work as he talked about her life. The college’s copper urns had been replaced by two of Nina’s most beautiful lacquerware water jars, and they were filled with orchids. The mass cards with the reproduction of
Perfect Circles
, Sally’s painting of us that last summer at the lake, were piled neatly on a table by the door.
“Je n’ai rien négligé.”
Me and Nicolas Poussin.

During the funeral, my children and I sat under the mural of the prairie Jesus performing the miracle of the loaves and fishes. He was wearing a white robe, and His arm was raised in benediction. I tried to keep my eyes on that sign of blessing, but I kept seeing other things: Taylor, looking like a Parisian schoolgirl in her black double-breasted coat and beret, pulling back from her father and grandmother as they walked up the centre aisle. Stuart stumbling and Nina reaching to steady him as they took their places in the front pew. Hugh Rankin-Carter at the lectern, unrecognizable for a moment in a dark business suit, his face broken by anguish. Hilda McCourt, back ramrod straight, saying good-bye to another free spirit. And in front of the altar, inescapable, the plain pine box that held all that was left of Sally’s grace and laughter and beauty.