The Early Investigations of Joanne Kilbourn (3 page)

They hadn’t brought the ambulance up to the stage. There were so many people on the grounds, and I guess someone had told them there wasn’t any hurry. We wouldn’t let the ambulance people take over. They tried, but Dave, who was usually the most courteous of men, snarled at them to get away. As we began carrying Andy toward the ambulance, a woman dressed in blue came over, wordlessly took one corner of the stretcher from Dave and walked along with us.

I had noticed her earlier because she was a genuine beauty. She was, I think, close to sixty, but auburn-haired still, and she had the freckled skin of the natural redhead. As one of the attendants slid Andy’s body into the ambulance, she reached her hand out toward the open doors in a gesture so poignant that Dennis Whittaker from our city paper, the
Sun Examiner
, took a picture of her that the paper used on their front page the next day.

We should have counted our lucky stars when we opened the paper and saw that heart-stopping picture. It could have
been worse. Seconds after that photo was taken, the nightmare of that afternoon turned another corner.

Eve Boychuk had climbed into the ambulance before the attendants put Andy’s body in. She was hunched over, sitting on one of the little jump seats ambulances have so family members can go along to the hospital with their loved ones. The ambulance had begun to pull away when a small, dark figure broke through the crowd and ran after it. She was shouting, but in a language I couldn’t understand. It was Andy’s mother, Roma Boychuk.

Eighty-three years old, brought from her neat little home in the west end of Saskatoon to watch her son’s triumph, and we had forgotten about her. She had lived in Canada for seventy years, but she was still uneasy with English. Ukrainian was the language of her heart, and it was in Ukrainian she was crying out as she tried to stop the ambulance that was carrying her son away.

The scene was like something out of a silent movie: the round little figure in black running across the field, dust swirling around her heavy legs as the sun fell in the sky and the ambulance sped away. But the movie wasn’t silent, and you didn’t have to know Ukrainian to hear the anguish in her voice.

I didn’t recognize the man who ran after her. He was tall and very thin. He looked like the singer James Taylor. The auburn-haired woman and I stood and watched as he reached Roma, enclosed her small body in his arms for a few moments and then, still holding her, walked across the dusty field toward us. When he came close, we could hear that he was saying to her the soft, repetitive nonsense words you use to soothe a child.

She was crying freely now, and her pain hung in the air like vapour. The auburn-haired woman felt it and reached out to Roma. She placed her fingertips under Roma’s chin
and gently lifted the old woman’s face so that Roma could see her. They stood there looking into one another’s eyes for perhaps ten seconds – two women united by grief and pain. Then Roma made a terrible feral sound, a hissing growl, the sound of a kicked cat, and she leaned closer to the woman and spat in her face. The man grabbed Roma and I reached for the auburn-haired woman, but she was running across the field toward the parking lot. I started after her, but when I’d run a few steps I was hit by a sense of futility. What was the point? Andy was dead. And so I just stood there as sirens sliced the air and police cars screamed over the hill.

Then someone was holding me. Suddenly my daughter, Mieka, was behind me; her arms, suntanned and strong, were around me.

“Oh, Mummy.” She buried her head in my neck the way she had when she was a little girl. Over her shoulder, I could see Howard Dowhanuik with his arms resting on the shoulders of my two sons. They were still in their baseball uniforms, and I remembered they’d had a game before Andy was scheduled to speak.

“So who won?” I asked them. The automatic question. Andy would have approved.

“Us,” said Peter, my older son, who was a head taller than I was. He had cried only once since he was a child, but he came running to his sister and me, and wept.

In the west a bar of gold separated sky and land. Over Peter’s shoulder, I could see a grove of poplars. Already their leaves were turning, and the golden light caught them and warmed them to the colour of amber.

I closed my eyes and there, in memory, was another day of golden light. My classics professor was standing at her desk while the September sun streamed in the window, and she told us about the myth of the Heliades. Phaeton, she said, shaking her head sadly, had tried to drive the chariot of the
sun across heaven, and Zeus had struck him down and turned his sisters into poplar trees. As they wept for their dead brother, the tears of Phaeton’s sisters hardened into amber.

As I closed my arms around my son, I knew that my heart had already turned to wood.

At six o’clock the next morning I was walking across the Albert Street bridge, thinking about murder. The city was sullen with heat from the day before, and it was going to be another scorcher. Mist was burning off Wascana Lake, and through the haze I could see the bright sails of windsurfers defying the heat. Already the T-shirts of the joggers I met on the bridge were splotched with sweat, and I could feel the cotton sundress I’d grabbed from Mieka’s closet sticking wetly to my back.

The heat was all around me, but it didn’t bother me. I was safe in the isolating numbness of aftershock. It was a feeling I was familiar with, and I hugged it to me. This was not my first experience with murder, and I wasn’t looking forward to what came after the numbness wore off.

Three years earlier, in an act as senseless as it was brutal, two strangers had killed my husband, Ian. His death changed everything for me. The obvious blows – the loss of a husband and father – had left me dazed and reeling. But it was what Ian’s death implied about human existence that almost destroyed me.

Until the December morning when I opened the door and Andy Boychuk was standing there, shivering, telling me there was painful news, I had believed that careful people, people like me, could count on the laws of cause and effect to keep us safe. The absence of motive in Ian’s murder, the metaphysical sneer that seemed to be the only explanation for his death, came close to defeating me.

It had been a long climb back, and I thought I had won. I thought I had vanquished the dark forces that had paralyzed me after Ian’s murder, but as I stood on the bridge and looked at the sun glaring on the water and smelled the heat coming up from the pavement, I knew nothing was finished. I could feel the darkness rising again, and I was desperately afraid.

The snow was deep the night Ian died. It was the end of December, the week between Christmas and New Year. We always get snow that week, and the day Ian died was the day of the worst blizzard of the winter.

He had driven to the southwest corner of the province just after breakfast. He went because he had lost the toss of a coin. There were two funerals that day: one in the city for the wife of one of the government members and one in Swift Current for an old
MLA
who’d been elected in the forties. Two funerals, and the night before at a holiday party, Ian and Howard Dowhanuik had had a few drinks and tossed a coin. Ian lost.

We quarrelled about his going. I called him, dripping from the shower, to make him listen to the weather forecast. He dismissed it with an expletive and disappeared into the bathroom. Fifteen minutes later, pale, hung over and angry, he got into the Volvo and drove to Swift Current. That was the last time I saw him alive.

At the trial, they pieced together the last hours of my husband’s life. He had spoken well and movingly at the
funeral, quoting Tennyson in his eulogy. (“I’m a part of all that I have met … /How dull it is to pause, to make an end/To rust unburnished, not to shine in use.”) After the service, he went to the church basement and had coffee and sandwiches, talked to some supporters, kissed the widow, filled his Thermos and started for home. It was a little after four in the afternoon.

It must have been the girl who made him stop. I saw her at the trial, of course: a dull-eyed seventeen-year-old with a stiff explosion of platinum hair and a mouth painted a pale, iridescent mauve. Her boyfriend was older, nineteen. He had shoulder-length blond hair and his eyes were goatish, pink-rimmed and vacant.

They didn’t look like killers.

The boy and the girl had separate lawyers, but they were alike: passionate, unsure young men who skipped over the death and asked us to address ourselves to the defendants’ state of mind on the night in question. The boy’s lawyer had a curious way of emphasizing the key word in each sentence, and I, who had written many speeches, knew that if I were to look at his notes I would see those words underlined.

“He was
frustrated,”
the boy’s lawyer said, his voice squeaking with fervour. “His
television
had broken down. And then his car got a flat tire on the night of the
blizzard
. And he wanted to take his girlfriend to the
party
. When Ian Kilbourn stopped to offer assistance, my client was already agitated, and when Mr. Kilbourn
refused
to drive my client and his girlfriend to the party, my client’s
frustration just boiled over
. He had the wrench in his hand anyway, and before he knew it, it just
happened. Frustration, pure and simple.”

“Fourteen times,” the Crown prosecutor said, leaping to her feet. “The pathologist said there were fourteen blows. Mr. Kilbourn’s head was pulp. Here, look at the pictures.”

When I saw the dark spillage of my husband’s head against the snow, the old, logical world shattered for me. It was months before I was able to put the pieces together again, and it was Andy who made me believe there was a foundation on which it would be safe to rebuild.

One evening the September after my husband died, I was in my backyard cutting flowers, and I sensed someone behind me. It was Andy, and there was a look on his face that was hard to read in the half light. As always when he talked with friends, there was no preamble.

“Jo, I’ve had a hell of a time dealing with what happened to Ian. I know it’s been a thousand times worse for you, but today something came back to me, and it’s helping. When I was in high school we read
Heart of Darkness
– I guess all the grade twelves read it that year. Anyway, the woman who taught us said that Kurtz possessed a mind that was sane but a soul that was mad. I think those kids who killed Ian must have been like that. Somehow that explains a lot. The world’s a rational place, Jo. Anyway,” he had said, “that’s all I came to say.”

Much later, as I thought back to the words, they didn’t seem particularly profound, but on that September night I clung to them. In isolating my husband’s murderers as mutants, spiritual misfits, Andy had made it possible for me to reclaim the image of a world that made sense. But now the man who had touched my shoulder and turned me from the heart of darkness had been swallowed by the darkness himself.

I turned onto the path that curved around Speaker’s Corner. “A mind that was sane, but a soul that was mad,” I said. A woman walking by with her basset hound looked at me curiously. I smiled at her. “Just saying my mantra.” She
tightened her grip on the dog’s leash and quickened her steps. I didn’t blame her. If I could have managed it, I would have run from me, too.

Considering what was waiting for me at the hospital, perhaps leaving reality behind wasn’t such a bad idea. Howard had called at five o’clock that morning sounding tired and worried.

“Jo, I’m at Prairie Hospital – all hell’s about to break loose here. How long would it take you to get over here?”

“Howard, I was sleeping. Can’t it wait?”

“Would thirty minutes be all right? If you don’t want to drive, Dave’ll come over and pick you up.”

I looked at my clock. I had slept for three hours. Obviously, Dave and Howard hadn’t slept at all. They didn’t need a prima donna.

“No, I’ll walk. I could use the air. Why doesn’t Dave meet me in the park and he can fill me in on the way to the hospital.”

“Yeah, okay. I’ll tell him to meet you at the flowers.”

“Howard, the park is full of flowers.”

“The red ones. You know, the weird little ones – the ones that bite,” he said and hung up.

In the shower, it came to me. The ones that bite were snapdragons; there was a bank of snapdragons on a little hill past the bandstand. Sure enough, when I came over the hill, Dave Micklejohn was waiting. He was still wearing the white shorts and the Sartre T-shirt he’d had on at the picnic. He must have been at the hospital all night.

I put my index finger in the middle of his chest, right on the bridge of Sartre’s nose.

“Existence precedes essence,” I said.

“Never truer than today,” said Dave, straightening his shoulders. “Oh, Jo, this thing just gets worse and worse.”

“What now?” I said.

“Well, there’s no doubt at all that Andy was murdered. The pathologist is ninety-nine per cent certain Andy ingested potassium cyanide seconds before his death. They think it was in the water that he drank at the podium. You know, the stuff in the black Thermos that I filled myself and then put the little note on for good measure.”

I felt a coldness in the pit of my stomach. Cyanide in the water. My instincts had been right.

Dave waited for reassurance. “Oh, Dave, the police will know the note was a joke.”

“Well, for the moment they’re entertaining that possibility, hence I’m still a free person. You, incidentally, are a hero, Jo. When you decked that bigwig Spenser, you saved his life. If he’d managed to get the water down, there would have been two of them dead instead of …” He swallowed and looked toward the marina. The striped windsocks on the poles around the deck of the restaurant hung limp in the hot stillness of the morning. Dave swallowed again.

“Speaking of heroes, Dave, you’re not doing too badly yourself,” I said, touching his arm gently. “What’s happening at the hospital?”

“It’s full of media people. Jo, you wouldn’t believe the mess and the confusion in that lobby. They’ve already got a crew setting up a live feed to
Good Morning, Canada
. Andy’s murder will be coast to coast by 7:05. Great coverage, kiddo.” And then, smiling ruefully, he gave me the final piece of news. Eve Boychuk was insisting that she would take Andy home to their place in Wolf River and handle the burial herself. That was where I came in.