The Early Investigations of Joanne Kilbourn (13 page)

That September was her time to move into a place of her own and cook and go to classes and do laundry and dream dreams. She had genuinely liked Andy, but she was not yet nineteen, and he had been peripheral to her life. She was sad he was dead, and she was sensitive to my grief, but a new part of her life was going to begin in less than a week, and she was bright with joy.

Because I loved her, I was happy for her. But as I stood and watched my daughter earnestly compare guarantees on toaster ovens and look critically at no-iron sheets, it was hard not to feel a sense of loss – not just of her, but of me.

It had been twenty-eight years since I’d carried my suitcase up to the third floor of the house opposite Victoria College at the University of Toronto. And it was a quarter of a century since I’d invited my seminar group in political science to my flat on Charles Street for dinner, and we’d eaten spaghetti and drunk Italian wine out of fat bottles in straw baskets and argued all night about the meaning of
Last Year at Marienbad
and the philosophy of Ayn Rand. That was the year I met Ian. On our first date he took me to dinner at his logic professor’s house in north Toronto. The logic professor, who was smug and reputedly brilliant, was in his late thirties. His wife, whose name was Betsy, was twenty-one, like me, but she already had three little children. Her father had been a mathematician at
MIT
, and the logic professor had married her when she was sixteen, so he could, he said, “help her grow.” Besides the children, Betsy had two cocker spaniels. She called one Professor and one Wife.

It was winter but a beautiful starry night, and Ian and I walked home miles along Yonge Street. I held his arm, and even through his heavy winter coat, I felt a sexual charge. I knew that night I wanted to marry him, but not the rest, not
Betsy’s hot domestic world of babies and dogs and casseroles out of the
Good Housekeeping Cookbook
. We would be different, Ian and I – twin stars, separate and brilliant and eternal … We would be different …

And now it was Mieka’s time to turn the key of the door of her first private home, to cook her own suppers for friends, to make her own choices, and I knew how I would miss these two: that daughter of mine, that younger me.

That week wasn’t all elegiac. Politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum, and our party had, for ten days, been without a leader. In politics, you do what you have to do. Once when our party was in deep financial waters, I went to a funeral where the best friend of the dead man stood outside the funeral chapel with a fried-chicken bucket and took up a collection for the party. No one was shocked. Even the widow wrote him a handsome cheque before she left for the cemetery. Life goes on.

I was not surprised that the person who came to ask my support was Craig Evanson – “that floppy man,” Peter had called him once when he was little, and in our family, the name stuck.

Craig Evanson
was
a floppy man. Tall and shambling, his body was as loose-limbed as his wife’s was clockwork tight. I had always liked Craig, and on Wednesday morning, when I came to the door, barefoot and without makeup, and saw him kneeling there talking to my dogs through the screen door, I remembered why.

He was always full of hope, even now when, in my eyes at least, his life had turned out badly. He had wanted three things. I knew this because years before when our children were small, Craig had told me what he wanted. That was the kind of dopey, ingenuous thing he was always doing. He said he wanted to be close to his wife and son, to have friends to
talk law with and drink with, and he wanted to serve as the member for Regina-Little Flower till he was sixty-five years old and could retire and write his memoirs. It was, I guess, not much to want from life.

They were modest dreams, but Julie Evanson had undercut them all. Her love for their son, at first so consuming and then so conditional, had driven Mark away in confusion. Her ambition had coarsened Craig’s relationship with his friends, and her need to make Craig leader of the party had jeopardized his seat in Little Flower. She had made her husband’s name synonymous with all those terms we smirk over: wimpy, spineless, henpecked. She had made him into a joke, but as I saw him with the golden September light behind him, bending to soothe my dogs with his words, it was hard not to feel the old tug of affection.

He was so happy to see me, so grateful to be invited to stay for coffee. And as we sat in the middle of the chaos of Mieka’s packing and talked about our children it was like the old easy days. I told him I’d spent a little time with Mark and Lori and had seen their baby, and it was as if someone had thrown a switch inside him. We talked about Mark’s gentleness and Lori’s beauty and the baby’s brightness, and Craig glowed with happiness. Then, suddenly, the switch was shut off.

“You know that Julie thinks Mark has betrayed her,” he said.

We sat in awkward silence. Even her name was enough to take the shine from the morning. Finally, he shook himself like an old dog. “Anyway, Jo, I’m here for a reason, and you know what it is. I’m running for leader. If you’re committed elsewhere, or you want to wait and see who else announces, that’s okay. I just want to be considered.”

“You’ll be considered.” I tried to sound gentle.

“But not for long and not seriously,” he said flatly.

“Craig …” I tried to find a way to take the sting out of turning him down. “You’re such a good constituency man – everybody says you’re the best. It’s just that you know how tight and how dirty this election’s going to be. I think we need someone …”

“Smarter.” He supplied the word for me.

I didn’t say anything.

“God damn it, Jo. After all these years, that hurts. I wish Andy hadn’t given that last interview. It just about killed Julie.” He looked at his watch. “Well, I should be getting home.” He stood up – the floppy man making his exit. “Thanks for the coffee and the talk.”

Sad and embarrassed, I walked him to the door. He started to leave, then he turned.

“I can’t disappoint her again, Jo.”

“I know that, Craig.”

“She’s given up everything for me,” he said simply, then he went down the walk, got in his car and headed home to a marriage that I couldn’t even begin to imagine.

The story has a postscript. The next morning, after we finally got everything loaded in Howard’s van, I ran into the house to get my sunglasses. The phone was ringing. I was going to leave it. Then I worried that it might be some problem with the boys or maybe with the college kid I’d hired to stay with them while I was in Saskatoon. But it was a woman’s voice.

“Don’t stand in his way, Jo. Craig might not be tough, but I am.” Then her humourless laugh and she hung up. So he had told her.

When I got in the van, Mieka said, “Mummy, you’re white as a ghost.”

“Nothing, just a nasty telephone call.”

“A crank caller?” asked Mieka, all concern.

“No, sweetie. Remember Mark Evanson? Well, it was his mother, Julie.” I put on my sunglasses. “I think Julie is about ready to start her own coven.”

Mieka smiled, but Howard didn’t. “Be careful around her, Jo. She’s got a wicked temper.”

“I’ll be careful, Howard. Now come on, old man, let’s get this show on the road.”

Mieka, house-proud, didn’t want to eat with us. Her new place was a two-storey frame house on Ninth Street. She and her boyfriend had come up earlier in the summer and rented it from a woman who was spending a year in Dublin studying Lady Gregory. It looked perfect to me when we opened the door, and more perfect after we’d spent the afternoon switching furniture around and unpacking Mieka’s stuff. But my daughter is not me. She said she wouldn’t enjoy dinner when she knew that things “at home” – and she used the word “home” to describe the house on Ninth Street – weren’t quite right yet. So she waved Howard and me off, told us to have fun and invited us for a spaghetti dinner the next day before we drove back to Regina.

“So,” I said standing on the sidewalk in front of my daughter’s new home, “are you ready to take a brokenhearted mother out for dinner?”

“You’ll love this place,” said Howard.

“I’ll bet it has leather menus,” I said.

Howard looked off in the distance thoughtfully. “You know, I believe it does.”

Howard is not adventurous when it comes to food. Years ago a nouvelle cuisine place opened in town, and Ian and I dragged Howard there between meetings. He’d eaten without complaint, but his despair as he searched the menu for something more substantial than slivers of sole had been palpable. Since then I had let him pick the restaurant, and we
always went to places where the beef was cut thick, and the bar Scotch was top of the line.

Tonight, as we drove to the west side, he said, “You’ll like this place, Jo. They grow their own vegetables.”

“Do they rope their own steers, too?”

Howard snorted. “No wonder Mieka’s glad to get rid of you for the evening.”

The Hearth did turn out to be a very good restaurant – lots of oak and dark leather and candlelight and a big functioning fireplace, which felt good on a cool September night. The waiter brought the menus, and Howard ordered a double Glenfiddich on the rocks. I ordered vermouth with a twist, and when our drinks arrived, Howard took a long, satisfied pull on his Scotch and settled back in his leather chair.

“Well, how are you doing?” he said.

“Okay, I guess, but I don’t want to talk about me, I want to talk about Andy.”

“I’ve got no problem with that.”

“You know, the police have that portfolio Andy always used for his speaking notes – the blue leather one with –”

“ ‘Every Ukrainian Mother’s Dream’ on it in gold.” Howard finished the sentence and smiled.

“Millard found a poem in there. It wasn’t there earlier, I know, because I checked the speech just before Andy went on the stage. Someone had copied out William Blake’s poem ‘The Sick Rose’ – it’s pretty standard stuff, I think, on most freshman English courses. Anyway it was beautifully written in calligraphy – is that redundant? At the top were two letters – initials maybe –
A
and
E
, and they were joined by a bunch of little curlicues like the initials of the bride and groom on a wedding invitation. I can’t get those initials out of my mind.”

Howard finished his drink and put the empty glass carefully on the centre of his coaster.

The waiter came and asked if we were ready to order.

Howard looked at me hopefully. “They are reputed to do a first-rate Chateaubriand here, but it’s a dish for two and I’m always a one. Would Chateaubriand be acceptable?”

“Absolutely.”

“Well, then, we’ll have that and –” he pointed out a bottle of Bordeaux on the wine list “– a half litre of that.”

When the waiter left, he turned back to me. “About the initials – what do you make of them?”

“I guess the most obvious assumption is that they’re wedding initials – Andy and Eve. But whoever put that poem in the portfolio killed Andy. I’m sure of it. Do you think Eve Boychuk is capable of murder?” It was the first time I’d said the words aloud, and I felt a shiver of apprehension.

We had chosen a table close to the fireplace. The rosy light turned Howard’s drink to fire, and cast flickering shadows across his old hawk’s face. He looked like a man to talk to about murder.

“I don’t know, Jo. I’m not one of those cynics who says that everyone’s capable of murder. There’s a threshold there that most of us could never cross. But Eve’s had such a hell of a life, I just don’t know.”

The waiter brought our wine. Howard absently gave it his approval, and the waiter filled our glasses. “You know, Jo, I’m glad we’re talking about this. It may ruin our dinner, but since Andy died, I’ve had more than a few ruined dinners. You see, I think if it weren’t for me, Andy would never have met Eve.”

The salad arrived and Howard brightened. “Now does this meet with your approval? You will note, recognizable chunks of everything, a good garlicky dressing, and they have the wit here to bring your salad before dinner when you’re not too loaded to eat it.

“Anyway, back to the beginning, and the beginning was my thirtieth birthday, April 17, 1963. That was the day I
arrived in Port Durham, Ontario, and that was the day I met Eve Lorscott.”

When he said that name, I felt as if I had lit up a pinball machine – lights and bells everywhere. “You mean Eve is a Lorscott – one of the Lorscotts of the Lorscott case? I remember it from when I was at U of T, but how come no one ever told me it was Eve?”

Howard speared a piece of tomato and smiled. “Because, my friend, it was none of your business. Really, Jo, it was no one’s business. After all, Eve hadn’t committed a crime, and she had come out here to make a new beginning, so what was to be gained?

“Anyway, on April 17, I arrived in Port Durham, and for a Ukrainian boy from Indian Head it was like landing on the other side of the moon. Two days before, Ray Lewis had called me from Toronto. He was my prof at the law school in Saskatoon, and he’d followed my career a little so he knew that I’d made a bit of a specialty of the laws governing the insane. Not a bad preparation for politics, come to think of it. Anyway, Ray called and said he had a case that he thought I could be a real help with and, in the process, make a name for myself in the east. It seemed like a hell of a great idea at the time.

“Anyway, I was on the first plane out. Ray picked me up at the airport and drove me to Port Durham. You know, Jo, I’ll remember that drive till the day I die.” He sipped his wine and smiled. “Rural Ontario on an April day. It’s hard to believe the same God that made the prairie made those gentle hills and the little rivers and the ditches filled with wildflowers. And those farms –” he shook his head in disbelief. “All those farms with the new paint on the barns and the fuzzy sheep and fenced-in fields – they looked like something you’d give a kid to play with. We got into Port
Durham around noon – pretty little place, have you ever been there, Jo?”

“Once, for a weekend with a friend from school.”

“Well, Ray took me to the hotel for lunch and filled me in on what I could expect to find at the Lorscott house. Tudor Lorscott, the father, was in Port Durham Hospital. He was badly hacked around the face, neck and groin, but he was going to live. His wife, Madeline, had lost four fingers on the left hand when she tried to stop the attack. The fingers were gone – kaput – but she would be released from hospital later in the week. Nancy Lorscott, the daughter who had, as the papers said, ‘wielded the axe,’ was in the hospital ward of the Port Durham Correctional Centre, a two-years-less-a-day provincial jail, which also served as a remand centre. Nancy was crazy as a bedbug but physically okay. Eve Lorscott, the younger daughter, the one who had called Ray and asked him to handle things, was waiting for us at the house.