The Early Investigations of Joanne Kilbourn (12 page)

Rick Spenser turned out to be an accomplished, considerate, no-nonsense cook. If the meal he prepared for us wasn’t the best meal I’d ever eaten, it was certainly in the top ten.

He called just before two and asked me to meet him at the fish counter of the Piggly Wiggly. When I arrived ten minutes later, there he was, a striking figure in rough-weave cotton pants and an open-necked shirt the colour of bark cinnamon. Next to him a woman with a print dress pulled too tight over her small, round, pregnant stomach was looking speculatively at a slab of whitefish. An adolescent boy on yellow roller skates glided up to the counter, filled a clear plastic bag with oysters in the shell and skated toward the front of the store. Rick Spenser didn’t see either of them. He was wholly absorbed in something he was pointing to inside a closed glass case.

Behind the counter a bored young woman wearing surgical gloves stood holding a fish.

When I touched Rick on the arm, he didn’t even turn toward me.

“Good, you’re here,” he said. “What do you think of that pickerel? This young woman tells me they were caught last night and flown in from the north this morning.”

“From the way the eyes are bulging I’d say she’s telling
the truth. I think twenty-four hours ago that pickerel was probably swimming in Lac La Ronge planning her new fall wardrobe.”

“What?” He looked puzzled.

“I think the fish looks great, Rick.”

“Oh, good.” He was still distracted. “That’s what I thought, too. Now, do your children like pickerel?”

“I don’t think anyone’s children like pickerel.”

He didn’t miss a beat. “We’ll get them steaks. Children like steaks.” He wrote something in a little pocket notebook, then spoke to the woman behind the counter, who was still holding the fish. “We’ll take that one and the third one from the left.”

While she was wrapping the fish, he handed me his notebook. “See if there’s anything you’d like to add.” It was a splendid list: chicken livers, cream, butter, nutmeg, watercress, baguettes, pickerel, beef tenderloin, new potatoes, fresh dill, walnut oil, blueberries, and at the bottom in tiny letters, “Does J have a garden?”

“How can you add to perfection?” I said, handing the notebook to him, “and, yes, I have a garden.”

For the first time since I’d come into the store, he looked at me. “I hope you’re going to like me, Joanne.”

It was such an intimate and revealing thing to say that I was taken aback. “Of course, I’m sure I will …” We both stood there, embarrassed, until Rick had the wit to get us moving.

“Good, that’s settled. Now let’s leave the Piggly Wiggly behind and get to your place and start cooking.”

From the first, we were easy with one another. When we were taking the grocery sacks out of the trunk I said, “Do you like kids?”

He turned and looked hard at me. “Honestly?”

“Honestly.”

“I hate them. They scare me.”

“Mine won’t.”

“Well,” he said, sighing, balancing the French bread delicately on top of two bags of groceries, “I’m willing to be convinced.”

I guess one of the reasons we fell in together so easily was that we shared two passions: food and politics.

Rick had bought an apron that he unwrapped with great ceremony before we began to cook. It was a huge red-and-white striped affair – a butcher’s apron. When I laughed, he produced a duplicate – but in a smaller size – for me.

“Jo, you said you were a serious cook, so I thought perhaps we could cook together.” He tied my apron at the back, then scrutinized me closely. “I just can’t imagine why these would have been on the clearance table. Now let’s have a glass of something cold and get started.”

“There’s some Carta Blanca in the refrigerator.”

“You really are perfect,” he said. I could feel my neck colouring with pleasure.

We cooked well together. Rick would run through what he had in mind, then, without even discussing it, each of us took a couple of tasks.

There was one odd note. As we stood with the bowl of chicken livers between us, I realized that the recipe for pâté Rick gave me was my own. Not like mine, but mine to the smallest detail. I’d come up with it when I was pregnant with Mieka and I’d had a problem with anemia. Our doctor had prescribed liver, liver and more liver, and the pâté had been one of the ways I’d come up with to make it tolerable. I could close my eyes still and remember standing in that gloomy kitchen in our house on Avenue B and trying out different combinations of herbs and spices till I’d hit upon thyme and allspice. And I could remember Ian’s expression when I’d used the last of his Christmas cognac to moisten
the pâté. It had been a wonderful addition, but in those days we saw brandy once a year, so I’d switched to cream and melted butter, cholesterol be damned, and that was the way I made pâté to this day. But here was a man who was almost a stranger, and he had my recipe right down to the last cracked peppercorn.

When I spooned the pâté out of the blender bowl into a round little dish, I said to Rick, “This is terribly deflating. All those years believing this was my own invention. Anyway, I’m glad we made it today – it was one of Andy’s favourites.”

He broke off a heel of bread, spread it with pâté and handed it to me. “Here’s to Andy Boychuk,” he said with a smile.

“You need one, too,” I said. So I broke off the other heel of bread, spread it with pâté and handed it to him. “Here’s to Andy Boychuk. Here’s to Andy.” And very solemnly, we both ate.

For someone who hated children, Rick was thoughtful and generous with them. While we were cooking, he gave Peter money to get a bag of ice cubes and a case of soft drinks, and he threw the ice into an old washtub on the deck so the drinks would keep cold for the kids during supper. And, perhaps even more telling, just before supper, when Angus came in to say we had an hour, tops, to eat and be at the ball diamond because his game had been rescheduled, Rick accepted Angus’s need without question. “Really, Joanne, it’s all right. Everything’s prepared. We just need to get the coals ready. We five can be full and happy and sitting in the dugout in an hour.”

“I don’t think Angus’s coach would be wild about all of us sitting in the dugout, but I can teach you the terminology when we get there. Are you sure you don’t mind? We could feed the kids and eat after they leave, you know.”

“And miss your son’s performance? Never. Let’s have another glass of burgundy and get the steaks on. We can come
back for dessert. I think people in Ottawa will be impressed to hear that I went to a Little League game. You know,” he said happily, “baseball on Labour Day weekend does have a certain cachet.”

And so we went and sat in the bleachers and drank terrible coffee while the baseball mothers around us chanted their litany for their sons: “Come on, Brandon, buzz like a bee … You got him … Hum, baby, hum … Bring it in, Brandon, bring it in!” And the sun slipped down on the horizon and the sky glowed with streaks of pink and peach and purple. And I thought about Andy and how much he would have loved this evening. He would have been down on the field, volunteering to coach third base, yelling for the kids. I could feel the anger gathering. He should have been there. God damn it, he shouldn’t be dead. Then the tears started.

Rick didn’t say a word, just reached inside his breast pocket, pulled out a new handkerchief and handed it to me. I mopped my eyes and blew my nose.

“Sorry.”

“Don’t be, Joanne. Don’t try to hold on. It’s been one hell of a week. Now, look. There’s Angus putting that helmet thing on, so he must be going to get another turn …”

The evening ended in muted triumph. In his last turn at bat, my son hit one out of the park, but the Gulls still lost thirteen to one. Sort of like winning your poll but losing the election. We ate our blueberry tart by moonlight. It was an evening that seemed to flow. Rick and I sat on the deck with a pot of tea, and the kids drifted in and out of the house. Mieka came out to ask if there were any sheets and pillow cases she could take with her when she went to Saskatoon to start university. Angus came out to talk about owls. Did we know the burrowing owl was smaller than a person’s hand? Peter came out to thank Rick for a great meal and to ask me sotto voce if I’d seen his jockstrap. And,
in between, Rick and I sat and drank tea and talked. Or rather, I talked.

There was something cathartic about sitting in the dark with someone I barely knew. As Rick said, it had been one hell of a week. From the minute Andy lifted the glass that killed him, I had done what needed to be done. But now Andy was buried in a pretty little Catholic churchyard a few miles outside Wolf River. I had done the best I could for Andy’s wife and child. As a party, we would deal collectively with the question of who would be the next leader. Everything had been taken care of. There was nothing left to do. Tomorrow Andy would have been dead a week. It was time, time to give in, time to rage against the dying of the light.

I didn’t bother trying to be brave or strong. In all likelihood, I’d never see Rick again, and if I did, he’d know I wasn’t a paragon. I could live with that. So I talked about Andy and the book I wanted to write about him, and every rambling, incoherent memory brought a fresh stab of pain and an awareness of loss. But still, a week after his death, there was one area of pain I couldn’t touch in front of a stranger. I wasn’t ready yet to ask the question that was at the heart of everything: Who had killed Andy Boychuk?

Rick Spenser was a good listener, and when I stopped talking, we didn’t say anything for a while. We sat, two people who’d come too close to the lip of the horror that lies at the edge of our rational lives. Finally, Rick touched my arm, and I turned toward him. In the moonlight, he looked – strange words for such a substantial man – delicate and vulnerable. I wanted him to keep touching me. I wanted to touch him. It had been almost three years since my husband’s death, and as Rick’s hand rested warm and strong against my arm I felt the remembered stirrings of sexual heat. But after a few seconds he took his hand away, and when he spoke it wasn’t about passion.

“Joanne, let me help you with this book. You know all the people, and you’re here, but I don’t think that will be enough for this job. You’ve been around politics long enough to know how far the biography of a prairie politician will go in this country if there’s not a familiar name attached to it. And I can offer you something more concrete than a name on a dust jacket. I’m not without resources, contacts, file footage. A project like this can be easy or it can be difficult. I have access to the kinds of things that can make it easy. Let me help.”

I was astounded, and I said so. Finally, I asked the question that needed answering. “Rick, what’s in it for you? I know that’s crudely worded, but why would you want to be part of this?”

He shrugged. “I’m not sure that I know myself. But I think it has something to do with discharging a debt.”

For me, that was exactly the right answer.

“Rick, let’s have a glass of brandy and drink to Andy’s book, to
our
book. I have a bottle of something really special that Andy bought for my husband the last Christmas Ian was alive. I’ve been waiting for an occasion, and I think we are occasion enough. Come on. Let’s go over to the granny flat and we’ll open that bottle.”

“Sounds great, but what in God’s name is a granny flat?”

“You’re looking at it. It’s that apartment on top of the garage. I use it for an office.” I reached for his arm. “Come on. It’s easier to show you than tell you.”

He followed me through the dark garden and up the wooden staircase that led to the little balcony outside the door of the flat.

“Should I carry you over the threshold?” he said.

“I don’t think it’s that kind of collaboration,” I said, turning the key in the lock.

When the door opened, we were met by an arctic blast of cold air. I was annoyed at myself.

“Damn, no one’s been in here since the morning of the funeral, and the air conditioner’s been on high all that time.”

“It’s certainly efficient,” said Rick, rubbing his hands.

“No more than most. I guess this place is just sealed up so tight it seems that way. Anyway, here’s the cognac. Look at the label. Andy was always a generous man. And here are the glasses, but let’s take our drinks out on the balcony. It’s freezing in here.”

Rick poured and we stood on that ridiculous little balcony and looked at one another in the moonlight.

“Here’s to Andy Boychuk,” he said for the second time that evening.

“To Andy and to sane minds and souls that aren’t mad,” I said, and I sipped and felt the heat of the cognac spread through my veins.

In the morning I picked him up at his hotel and drove him to the airport. He wouldn’t let me get out of the car. “An airport is a grim place to say good-bye,” he said and he reached out and traced the lines of my cheekbones with his fingertips. When finally he spoke, his voice was husky. “I’ll call you tonight.”

He did, and he called many nights afterward. The thing to remember about my relationship with Rick Spenser is that he came at the right time in my life.

The word “bittersweet” is not part of my working vocabulary, but that’s the word that seemed to hang in the air that week as my daughter was getting ready to go to university. From the day she was born I had dreaded the day Mieka would go away to school, but suddenly, that September, her going seemed not just inevitable but right.

My relationship with my mother had always been so uneasy that I’d worried about how I’d be with a daughter. Mieka made it easy. From the first day she was level and sunny, and she had grown into a confident and optimistic woman. She has had her share of sadness and often more than her share of responsibility. In the months after Ian died, I had leaned on all the children but, because she was the oldest, I had leaned on her most. On the black days when I would awaken so tired and dispirited that all I could do was turn over in bed and watch the morning light on the wallpaper, it was Mieka, cheery and practical, who would get the boys off to school and run in with a cup of coffee for me before she caught her bus to high school. I’m not proud
of that time, but it’s there. And Mieka didn’t need a rerun.