The Early Investigations of Joanne Kilbourn (31 page)

I watched my reflection in the window, lifting the glass, drinking, and I wondered if there’d been enough time for him to find that out before he died.

Sitting in the granny flat, looking into the November night, I knew all my protections were gone. Since we had come up here, my dogs and me, the snow had stopped falling. My backyard was a smooth expanse of white, shining in the light from the house.

Crisp and even, but not deep. I knew how thin that layer of snow was. If you stepped on it, your foot would break through to the leaves, under there, decaying, wet and black, on the cold ground. You weren’t safe on that snow.

But you were never safe. Across the yard my house, a place where rational people had once planned their lives, stood in darkness. A spasm hit my bowels, then another. I doubled over, hugged my knees and rocked back and forth, back and forth, making a sound that was sometimes keening and sometimes a growl. Back and forth, back and forth until, sometime toward morning, the sky grew lighter and I slept.

I woke up in the chair, cold and disoriented. The room was full of light. My head was pounding; my mouth was dry; and the telephone was ringing.

The voice on the other end was male and pleasantly accented.

“May I speak with Ian Kilbourn, please?”

I thought, I must be careful here. I must sound sane. I mustn’t give anything away.

“My husband’s dead.”

An intake of breath on the other end of the line and then, “I’m so very sorry, Mrs. Kilbourn. Forgive me for disturbing you at this sad time.”

“No, it’s … He’s been dead a long time. I was just surprised to hear you ask for him.” My heart was pounding.

“Mrs. Kilbourn, I think, then, that I should speak with you. My name is Helke de Vries, and I’ve just purchased Homefree Insect Pest Control Service.”

“I don’t need an exterminator.”

“Mrs. Kilbourn, I’m not a salesman, but you’re correct about not needing an exterminator, because you already have one – me. Allow me, please, to explain. I spent yesterday going over invoices – familiarizing myself with the business. I’m looking at our records for services rendered to you, and I think there must be some mistake –”

“My mistake?”

“Please, allow me to finish. It is not money. All your bills have been paid promptly – in advance, in point of fact. You have done nothing wrong, but I’m concerned that we have. Are you there, Mrs. Kilbourn?”

“Yes. Please, tell me what you want. I’m not feeling at all well today.”

“It’s the carpenter ants in your addition. Perhaps if you’d just allow me to read you our instructions.”

I was so tired I could barely speak. “Read them, do whatever you want.”

“The service is to be provided to a residence at 433 Eastlake Avenue – that is your home?”

“Yes.”

“In the backyard, over the garage, there is a self-contained apartment unit, 150 square feet, accessible through a door that opens off a small balcony.”

“Yes.”

“The key is in a plastic bag taped to the inside of a window box to the left of the door to the unit.”

“No …” My voice was barely a whisper.

Helke de Vries sounded uncomfortable but determined. “Spraying program for carpenter ants to begin Saturday, October 8, 9:30 a.m. and continue weekly – that is underlined in red, Mrs. Kilbourn – until notice to discontinue. Payment, cash in advance. In the space marked client, there is the name Ian Kilbourn. Then there’s something handwritten in red pen – ‘Under no circumstances is anyone else in the family to know of the spraying program. The wife and kids are Save the Whales environmentalist types. Trouble.’ That last word is in capital letters and underlined.”

I felt like Alice after she walked through the looking glass. I picked up a pen and wrote “pest control” on the notepad in front of me.

“Mr. de Vries, could you give me the name of what you’ve been using?” I was trembling.

“Certainly. We have used an organophosphate spray and a methyl carbonate. In my opinion, we have used them too often, but today is Saturday, time for another treatment, so I thought I would check. Do you wish me to continue, Mrs. Kilbourn? We are paid, in cash, until after Christmas.”

“No, Mr. de Vries, I do not wish you to continue.”

“Then I should refund your money.”

“It isn’t my money. Who paid you?”

“The bill was paid in cash, and no receipt was given. The previous owners of the business assumed Mr. Kilbourn was paying.”

“Keep the money.” I was beginning to see light. “I need to know more. Would any of that stuff, the organophosphate or the methyl whatever it is, leave a residue?”

“The organophosphates would leave a yellow dusting.”

“Would it look like pollen?”

“Yes, an excellent description – like pollen.”

“Then stop it.”

“Your instructions, then, Mrs. Kilbourn, are to discontinue spraying until further notice?”

“No, Mr. de Vries, my instructions are to discontinue spraying until hell freezes over.”

There was a long silence, then laughter. “Another excellent description – thank you, Mrs. Kilbourn.”

“Oh, thank you, Mr. de Vries. Thank you.”

When I hung up, my body was trembling and sweating and pounding and cramping. I felt worse than I’d ever felt in my life, and better. Someone was trying to kill me. I should have been terrified. I should have been hiding under the bed. But all I felt was relief. The darkness wasn’t coming from me; it was outside. Out there, where it could be stopped.

I opened the door of the granny flat and stepped onto the porch. It was going to be a cold day. The sky was high and grey, and the sun was pale. I took deep breaths of cold air that knifed at my chest. The dogs ran past me down the steps and chased each other around the yard in the snow.

My stomach was empty, my mouth was dry, and I was trembling with cold and excitement, but I went straight to the phone and called Ali.

“Ali, good news. I’m not crazy. Somebody’s trying to kill me.”

Her voice was warm and encouraging, but it was her professional voice, guarded, holding back. “Jo, why don’t you turn this tape back to the beginning and let me follow along.”

I told her about Helke de Vries’s phone call, and his revelations. Ali listened without comment. When I finished, her questions were professional. She asked me to repeat the names of the insecticides the exterminators used, to tell her the size of the granny flat in square feet and to describe the kind of ventilation the room had.

“Jo, I’m going to have to check this out in one of my college texts. I haven’t studied pharmacology for fifteen years. I’ll call you back as soon as I can. Stay where you are. You’re not in the –”

“No, I’m out of there. I left the door open. I’m never going in there again. Ali …” I began to cry. “Oh, Ali, hurry.”

She called back in five minutes.

“Well, you have Mort to thank for this. He has the Oriental passion for order: a place for everything and everything in its place. Anyway, tell me if this sounds familiar. I’m going to read from the section on insecticides in a book called
The Pharmacological Basis of Therapeutics
, Goodmand and Gilman – the G-men, we used to call them in med school. Here’s the clinical profile of exposure to organophosphates. ‘Respiratory effects consist of tightness in the chest and wheezing respiration due to the combination of bronchi-constriction and increased bronchial secretion. Gastrointestinal symptoms occur earliest after ingestion and include anorexia, nausea and vomiting, abdominal cramps and diarrhea, localized sweating, fatigability and generalized weakness, involuntary twitchings.’ ”

My voice was small and frightened. “I’ve got all of them, Ali. Is it too late? Can you do anything?”

“Yes, I can, or my brother-in-law can until I get there. When was the last time you were in the granny flat?”

“Most of yesterday and all last night.”

She swore softly. “Nothing for it but do the best we can. Go take a hot, soapy shower, wash your hair and your fingernails,
and by the time you’re out of there, Phil will be pounding at the front door.”

“A house call?” I said.

“It’ll do him good,” she snapped. “Now into the shower. I’ll be there tonight. Mort and I will drive down this afternoon.”

I began to cry again. “Oh, Ali, you’re so good.”

“Jo, don’t. Mort bought himself a new
BMW
last week, and he’s been dying to get it on the highway. It’s a six-hour drive. We’ll be there by ten o’clock. Don’t fuss. In fact, it wouldn’t be the worst idea in the world if you spent a couple of days in bed. If you want to nap, do it. I still have a key from the last time I was there. Now, go get your shower, do what Phil tells you, and I’ll see you later.”

I made the shower as hot as I could stand it, soaped my body with some antibacterial soap the kids had for zits and scrubbed at my skin until it hurt.

By the time I was dry and in my robe, Dr. Philip Lee was at the front door, scowling.

“It was good of you to come to the house,” I said.

“My sister-in-law is a very persuasive woman,” he said. And then he smiled. “Well, what the hell, eh?”

While he examined me, he asked about the granny flat, the same questions Ali had asked. How big was it? How was it ventilated? How often had the extermination people sprayed? What did they use?

“Organophosphates.” He repeated my answer as he pressed down on my abdomen with his graceful hands. “Do you know what they used organophosphates for in Germany before the Second World War? They were active ingredients in nerve gases. Your granny flat was a little gas chamber for you, Mrs. Kilbourn. Amazing, eh?”

“Amazing,” I agreed weakly.

“Well,” he said after I’d pulled the covers over me, “you’re going to live. I would put you in a hospital if my brother and
sister-in-law weren’t coming. But you need a neurologist and a psychiatrist and” – he snapped his long, tobacco-stained fingers – “presto, they appear … More house calls.” He grinned. “Ali says you’re a nice woman, Mrs. Kilbourn. You’re certainly a lucky one. I’m going to prescribe atropine sulphate – perhaps you know it by its other name, belladonna. You take it orally, every four hours. Set your alarm. The timing is important. The atropine should relieve your symptoms. My brother might wish to prescribe something to reverse the muscular weakness, but I’ll leave that to him. I’ll call in your prescription for you, and the drug store will deliver it.”

He started to walk out of the room but turned in the doorway. He looked at his feet like a bashful boy in a movie, then shrugged.

“Could I look at it, Mrs. Kilbourn?”

I didn’t understand.

“Your gas chamber,” he said.

“Absolutely, be my guest. What the hell, eh?” I said and sank down into the warmth of my bed.

I waited for the prescription, and after it arrived, I took the phone off the hook, curled up and went to sleep. There were things I had to do: call the police, call the kids, call Rick. But the phone calls would have to wait. I needed sleep. I awoke around five o’clock, made myself a bowl of chicken noodle soup and ate it with some crackers, then I fell asleep again.

When I woke, it was just before ten. The national news was coming on.

I turned on the
TV
in my bedroom and put the phone on the hook. Sometimes Rick called as soon as his report was over, and suddenly I wanted very much to talk to him. I wasn’t crazy. I was a woman with a future again, a woman a man could think about loving, a woman who could think about having a man as part of her future.

And not just any man. I lay back on the pillows piled against the headboard of my bed and remembered. I remembered how his smile started in one corner of his mouth and spread, slow and knowing, until his face was transformed. And I remembered how his hair, dark blond like mine, fell forward when he bent his head to look down at me, and how he had sat on the bleachers with me in the twilight, and cooked with me and laughed with me and worked with me. And I remembered how he’d fit so smoothly into all our lives at Thanksgiving, and I thought, when Ali and Mort come, I’ll invite them for the holidays here with us, with my children and me, with Rick.

The phone rang and at just that minute his face filled the television screen. I picked up the receiver, but my eyes never left Rick’s image. He was still wearing his poppy. He must have rushed to the studio and grabbed yesterday’s jacket, with its poppy and its day-old creases, from the dressing room before going on the air.

I strained to listen to the television, but in my ear there was a woman’s voice, familiar and old: “And I thought, well, I’ll put all these books I brought back from overseas away until after Christmas when I can have a really good look at them. So it was while I was trying to find some space in that little garage of mine that …”

Rick was saying something about a group in the prime minister’s party meeting at a cottage in the Eastern Townships to talk about challenging the
PM’S
leadership before the next election.

The voice went on in my ear: “And that’s when I found the box. I can’t imagine why it didn’t surface before.”

Rick was taking a hard line against those who were plotting against the prime minister. “It is a question not just of party solidarity but of fundamental decency,” he said. “Decency has been a commodity in short supply during the
life of this government, but in the dying days perhaps it is not too much to hope …”

“At any rate, our little mystery is solved,” said the woman’s voice.

“Hilda McCourt,” I said, suddenly making the connection.

“Yes, Joanne, it’s Hilda. I’m sorry, I should have identified myself. Egotism seems to be as much a part of getting old as creaks and flatulence. Anyway, it is I, and the box I unearthed in the garage contained all my old grade books from E.T. Russell. It was the easiest thing in the world. I looked up grade twelve and found Boychuk, Andrue Peter – that’s Andrue with a ue, as I’m sure you know.” Angus had left an old spelling test on my night table. I picked up my pen and wrote, “Boychuk, Andrue Peter” in a clear space at the top of the paper.

“The boy with the unfortunate name, as I had remembered, came late in the year. His name is added at the bottom of the roll. The name is Primrose. Eric Spenser Primrose.”