Murder At The Mendel (6 page)

Mieka looked up, and her eyes were shining. “Oh, Mum, it was wonderful. That fresco is the most amazing art I’ve ever seen. But the thing that’s really dynamite is the painting of you and Sally. Of course, I had to tell everyone that was my mother up there.”

“Did that impress them?”

“Stopped them dead in their tracks.” Then she looked thoughtful. “The guide at the gallery told me Sally moved heaven and earth to get that painting on loan. He said that she was absolutely insistent that the lake picture be part of the exhibition so the other girl in the painting could see it.” Mieka turned to me. “Did you know about it before last night?”

“No, it was a surprise. I think Sally wanted to see my reaction.”

“She really must care a lot about you to go to all that trouble.”

“You know,” I said, “I think she does.”

Mieka picked up a marker and drew paw prints on the red tissue wrapping Angus’s baseball cards. She held the package up for my approval.

“Nice,” I said. “The dogs are lucky to have you to wrap for them.”

She smiled and handed me a box. “And I’m lucky to have you to wrap for me. It all comes around.”

“Yeah,” I said, “I guess it does.”

For a few minutes we worked along in silence, listening to the radio. It was Mieka who spoke first.

“Mum, what happened with you and Sally? You were like sisters when you were little. You told me that yourself. But on the way back from the Mendel today, it hit me that, until you and the boys moved up here last summer, the only time I’d seen Sally was at Daddy’s funeral. I remember that because afterwards, back at our house, I went upstairs and Sally and Nina were in my room fighting.”

“I’d forgotten that Sally came to your dad’s funeral,” I said. “Of course, that day was pretty much a blur for me, I certainly don’t remember a fight between Nina and Sally. What was it about?”

“I don’t know,” Mieka said. “It didn’t matter to me. The reason I’d come upstairs in the first place was because I was starting to lose it. But I do remember hearing Nina tell Sally she should leave because all she ever did was hurt you.”

“What did Sally say?”

“Nothing. I think she just left.”

I picked up an Eaton’s box. “What kind of paper for this one?”

“That’s a pair of driving gloves for Pete – to go with the new car you’re not getting him. Something manly.”

I held up some shiny paper covered in toy soldiers. “Enough testosterone in this one?”

She grinned and started making a bow. “Mum, I didn’t mean to pry before, when I asked you about Sally. You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”

“Except,” I said, “I think I do want to talk about it. Seeing that lake picture last night has brought back a lot of memories.” I reached over and touched her hand. “Mieka, let’s take a break and get some tea. I could use a daughter right now.”

We sat at the table in front of the glass doors that opened onto the deck from the kitchen. The backyard was brilliant with sunshine, and at the bird feeder, sparrows were pecking through the new snow at the last of the sunflower seeds and suet I’d put out that morning.

“I don’t know where to begin,” I said. “Maybe when Sally’s father died. That’s when everything went wrong.”

“September, 1958,” Mieka said quietly. “The date was in the catalogue I picked up at Sally’s show this morning. They had a nice little tribute to him.”

“Right,” I said, “except they glossed over a few things, like the way he died. Mieka, Des didn’t just die. He committed suicide, and he … he tried to take Nina and Sally with him.”

I could hear Mieka’s sharp intake of breath. “He tried to kill his own wife and child?” The elves and Santas on her sweater were rising and falling rapidly. A man who could murder his family was a long way from Mieka’s safe and sunny world. “He must have been a monster,” she said finally.

“No,” I said, “he wasn’t a monster. In fact, until he got sick, he was one of the most terrific people I ever knew. I used to love just being in the same room with him. Living was so much fun for him. He was so interested in everything; he could be as passionate about the right way to cook corn on the cob as he was about the way Sally built her sand castles or the way he made art.

“Then he had this massive stroke and everything changed. He used to love to swim. When I close my eyes, I can still see him running down the hill from the cottage and diving off the end of the dock into the lake. He never hesitated. Suddenly he couldn’t even walk without help. He’d been a great storyteller, and of course that was gone, too. After the stroke it was painful to watch him try to form a word. He was dependent on Nina and Sally for everything. He couldn’t
even feed himself properly. And, of course, worst of all, he couldn’t paint. For a man who had lived every day as intensely as Des had, I guess the future just looked …”

“Unacceptable?” asked Mieka in a high, strained voice. “So unacceptable that he decided to kill two innocent people?”

“But he didn’t kill them, Miek. My father saved Nina when he gave her the ipecac, and Sally had saved her own life by throwing up. They lived. Although for a while, I don’t think they much wanted to. You know, for a time, I didn’t want to. People talk about their world being turned upside-down. That was how it felt for me. As if suddenly everything had come loose from its moorings.

“That was the worst September. It rained and rained, and I was so alone and so scared. My father had to deal with everything: the police, the funeral, Nina and Sally at the hospital, his own patients. I never saw him. I remember when he came up to my room to get me for the funeral, there was a split second when I didn’t recognize him. It wasn’t so much that he’d aged as that life seemed to have seeped out of him. He didn’t have his heart attack until that next August, but I think your grandfather started to die when Desmond Love died.”

“And my grandmother was drinking,” Mieka said, a statement not a question.

“Yeah, she was drinking a lot that summer, and the ‘tragedy at the lake,’ as the papers called it, really propelled her into the major leagues. I felt as if I didn’t have anybody. Nina had always been there before, but she was in the hospital for weeks after Des died.”

Mieka looked puzzled. “I thought you said she was okay.”

“Physically she was, but she didn’t seem to recover the way she was supposed to. I kept asking my father when I could see her and he kept saying soon, she just needed rest. I guess I believed him because I wanted to. Then one night,
I overheard my parents fighting. Your grandmother had never liked Nina and she was screaming that Nina was faking her grief, playing on my father’s sympathy and my gullibility to keep us from seeing how things really had been at the lake. For once, my father didn’t just let her rant. He told her that Nina had suffered a complete breakdown and he told her –oh, God, Mieka, it’s been thirty years but I still feel sick when I think of this – my father said that morning when he’d gone by Nina’s room on his rounds, she’d been crouched naked in the corner, tearing at her own flesh with her fingernails – like an animal in a trap, that’s the phrase he used.”

Across from me, Mieka winced. “It’s hard to imagine. Nina’s always so controlled.”

“I know. Anyway, after that they were careful not to leave her alone, but I guess they didn’t think Sally was in any danger. I don’t know how else it could have happened, because one day Sally just walked out of the hospital. They found her with Izaak Levin.”

“The man in the picture with you and Sally,” Mieka said. “His name was in the show catalogue, too.”

“He used to come to the cottage for a few weeks every summer. I was about to say he was a friend of Des Love’s, but that wasn’t the connection. Izaak was Nina’s friend first. In fact, he was the one who introduced Nina to Des Love. Nina’s an American, you know, from New York, and Izaak knew her there. Anyway, once Sally got to Izaak’s place, she refused to leave. When my father tried to get her to come home to our house, she became hysterical. She said she was never going back to the house on Russell Hill Road. She was going to leave the city and never come back. And, of course, that’s exactly what she did.”

Mieka looked at me. “Sally was what? Thirteen? Why would any mother let a thirteen-year-old child move in with someone else?”

“For one thing the arrangement Nina and Izaak worked out was supposed to be temporary – just until Nina got better. There was a school of the arts for gifted children in New York, and they enrolled Sally there. She was supposed to come back at Christmas.”

“Except she didn’t come back at Christmas,” Mieka said.

“She never came back,” I said. “She never phoned. She never wrote. She just cut us all off as if we’d never existed. I must have written her a hundred letters that first year, but I never heard a word from her. Nobody did, not even Nina. She told me that Izaak kept her informed about Sally’s progress, but she never heard a word from her own daughter.”

Mieka looked puzzled. “Why would Nina let the situation go on? Can you imagine letting me just walk out of your life when I was thirteen?”

I smiled at her. “I can’t imagine letting you walk out of my life ever. But that’s us. Nina and Sally always had difficulties. When I think about it now, a lot of it was Des. He loved Sally so much and, of course, he was her teacher as well as her father. I think sometimes Nina must have felt excluded.”

“All the same, Sally was Nina’s daughter,” Mieka said.

“It was a bad time for everybody,” I said. “And in bad times, people don’t always think clearly. It must have been hard for Nina to know what was best for Sally, because no one could really understand why she’d turned against us. My dad’s explanation was that Sally was so filled with rage at Des for leaving her that her feelings for everyone and every place connected with him were tainted.”

Mieka looked thoughtful. “That makes sense to me. Don’t forget, Mum, she was only a kid. Thirteen – the same age as Angus is now. That’s pretty young to think things through.”

“Oh, Mieka, I know. But then the next year, when your grandfather died, Sally didn’t even come to the funeral. Izaak
Levin came, but he said Sally refused to come to Toronto. He had to leave her with his sister in New York. For a long time I found it hard to forgive her for that. My dad would have done anything for Sally, and she must have known how much I needed her. If I hadn’t had Nina, I don’t know if I could have made it.”

Mieka’s face was sad, “Did you ever hear Sally’s side of the story?”

“No, I never did. When sally and I finally got together again last summer, we were both pretty careful not to bring up the past. But I’m beginning to wonder now if that wasn’t a mistake. There’s a part of me that’s still mad at her, you know. And that’s not fair to either of us.”

“Talk to her,” Mieka said simply.

I stood up. “Well, doctor, if the therapy session’s over, we’d better get back to our wrapping. But come here and let me give you a hug first – for being so smart. I’ll throw in dinner, too, if you want. I think I’ve got a pan of lasagna in the freezer.”

She stood up and stretched. “Sounds good. I’ll consider it a professional fee. And, Mum, don’t forget to hear Sally’s side of things. I think after all this time, it may finally be her turn.”

CHAPTER

4

On the morning before Christmas I was pouring myself a second cup of coffee and thinking about making French toast for breakfast when the phone rang. Until the night of Sally’s opening, I hadn’t heard that low, gravelly voice for thirty years, but I knew who it was immediately. You don’t forget anything about a man you dreamed about through the heat-shimmering days and moonlit nights of your sixteenth summer.

Izaak Levin’s invitation had the polish that only practice brings. “Joanne, forgive the early morning call please, but in all the excitement the other night I didn’t have a chance to make an arrangement to see you again. I know this is Christmas Eve, and I’m sure you have plans, but I thought perhaps between Christmas and New Year’s we could have dinner together and share our remembrance of things past.”

“That sounds wonderful,” I said, “but my kids and I are going to Greenwater to ski that week. Can I have a rain check?”

“Of course,” he said. “I’ll call early in the new year. I won’t let you slip away again …”

As I hung up, I could feel my face flush. There was a mirror on the wall above the phone, and I gave myself a hard, critical look. My hair was the same ashy blond it had always been, but now it took more than lemon juice and sunshine to keep it that way. There were fine lines in the skin around my eyes, and my face was fuller than it had been when I was young, but, on the whole, I was comfortable enough with what I saw. “Not Sally Love, but not bad,” I said to my reflection. “Izaak Levin would be a fool to pass you up this time.” When the phone rang again, I was still smiling.

The smile didn’t last long. Sally was on the line, sounding edgy but in control.

“Jo, somebody just called to tell me there was a fire last night at womanswork. I should go down and see how bad the damage is. Would you come with me?” There was silence for a moment and when she spoke again, her voice had lost its authority. “I really could use some company, Jo. Can you meet me there in half an hour?”

“I’ll be there,” I said.

I went upstairs, dressed in a heavy wool sweater and jeans, woke Peter to tell him I’d be back before lunch, started out the door, then came back and made Peter come downstairs. “In case of a fire,” I said, vulnerable again.

When I backed the car out of the garage, it was snowing, theatrical lacy flakes that drifted steadily through the December air and made the city look like a scene from an old Andy Williams Christmas special. It was a little after eight-thirty, and the traffic was light as I drove across the bridge toward the centre of the city.

Fourteenth Street was a pretty street of pre-war houses, restored and fitted out as offices for architects and fast-track law firms; womanswork was in the middle of the block. What I remembered was a two-storey grey clapboard building, simple and elegant. It wasn’t elegant any more, but as I
looked through the smoky, snowy haze at what had once been Sally’s gallery, I was struck by the fact that even the ruins of the building had a certain perverse beauty. Water from the fire hoses had frozen in fantastic patterns against the charred skeleton, and snow had begun to layer itself on the burned wood. When I squinted against the smoke, the gallery looked like a Christmas gingerbread house.