The Early Investigations of Joanne Kilbourn (6 page)

Julie was haunted by demons of her own. Losing seemed to be like a slow poison seeping through her system. She was sullen with those of us who had worked on Andy’s campaign, and she was jubilant when, late in June, Andy had answered a question whimsically and had been forced to issue an apology. Before the six o’clock news was over, she was on the telephone. “Well, Jo, what do you think of your blue-eyed boy tonight?” she had asked.

Now summer was almost over, the blue-eyed boy was dead, and Julie’s boy was standing in front of me, his face glowing with pleasure.

“Mrs. Kilbourn, what are you doing here? I mean, God loves us all and everybody’s welcome at Wolf River, but what are you doing here?” Mark’s face was as open and without guilt as a newborn’s. He stood on the path, smiling, expectant, waiting for an answer.

“I came down with Mrs. Boychuk – you remember, Andy Boychuk’s wife. They’re friends of your mum and dad’s. I guess you heard what happened to –”

The smile vanished. Mark cut me off. “We heard, but we didn’t want C-A-R-E-Y here –” he spelled carefully, then rested his hand on the shoulder of the boy in the wheelchair “– to sense that anything was wrong, so we’ve been walking him all morning. He loves the new chapel – all the bright colours, I guess.”

For the first time, I noticed the boy. I looked into his face. It was hard to imagine him responding to anything. He was dressed neatly, even whimsically, in shorts and a T-shirt that had a picture of Alfred E. Neuman from
MAD
magazine on the front and the words “What, Me Worry?” underneath. He would have been a handsome boy. His head was shaped like his father’s, and his hair was the same red-brown, but Carey’s head, too heavy for his slender neck, lolled to one
side like a flower after a rainstorm. His features were regular but they were slack, and his mouth gaped. A little river of spit ran from his mouth to his chin. Mark reached down and dabbed at it with a Kleenex.

I held Carey’s hand and smiled at him, but he didn’t respond. When I straightened, I found myself face to face with Lori Evanson. She had stepped out from behind her husband, and she was looking at me with wonder.

“Mrs. Kilbourn, we saw you on television,” she said. “Such a terrible thing – an evil thing! You were very brave to save Mr. Spenser’s life.” Her voice was light and sweet, with a lilting singsong quality, like a child’s reciting something she’s learned by heart. Lori was holding a baby I knew was her own, but there was a quality about her, a sense that somehow she would never move much past adolescence.

It wasn’t her body. Physically, she was mature and beautiful. She looked the way we all wanted to look when we were eighteen. She was wearing a sundress the colour of a cut peach, and her arms and face were golden with tan. Up close, she smelled of suntan lotion and baby powder. Her shoulder-length hair was dark blond and streaked from the sun. She was incredibly lovely but in her eyes, which were as blue as forget-me-nots, there was such vacancy. If the eyes are the windows to the soul, Lori Evanson’s soul was spotless.

“We’re so glad you’re all right. ‘Praise the Lord.’ That’s what Mark said when he heard you were fine.” She stopped for a second and looked gravely at her husband, at this man who could say just the right thing; then she directed those incredible eyes at me. “You’ve always been so good to us – that toaster oven with sandwich grill when we got married, and the cheque for twenty-five dollars when Clay was born. Look, isn’t he a precious lamb?” She turned the baby toward me for inspection. The baby was handsome and reassuringly
alert. “So kind,” his mother continued. “If ever there’s anything we can do for you.”

“No thanks, Lori. I was just looking around. Perhaps I’ll go over to the prayer centre. Are visitors allowed?”

Her perfect brow wrinkled. “Gee, Mrs. Kilbourn, I guess so, but you know, I don’t know if anyone ever asked. I mean we’re all, like, very proud of the chapel. It was designed by Soren Eames in consultation with a prize-winning Regina architect.” Her brow smoothed. “The Charlie Appleby Prayer Centre seats 2,800 people and is a multipurpose area that can be converted for other uses. The building also boasts four radiating modules: a cafeteria, a gymnasium, a faith life centre and a complex of state-of-the art business offices.” Her innocent blue eyes shone with happiness. She was on home ground again. I saw the care with which those vacant blue eyes had been made up – peach eye shadow blending into mauve and then a soft smudge of grey eye liner beneath the lower lashes. Suddenly, those perfect eyes focused on something behind me, and they lit up. I turned to see what she was looking at.

On the main road that led through the campus, a man was getting out of a black Porsche. He was dressed like a university kid – denim work shirt and blue jeans – but even from this distance it was apparent that he wasn’t a kid. He was tall and boyishly slender but there was something defeated about the set of his shoulders that suggested this man’s worries went deeper than a conflict in his class timetable. When he began to walk toward us, I recognized him. He was the James Taylor look-alike, the one who’d run after Roma Boychuk to console her after Andy died. Lori grabbed my hand.

“Here’s Soren now. Oh, Mrs. Kilbourn, you have to meet him. He is so kind and good. He understands everything, and I mean everything.”

But the man who understood everything walked past us with a curt nod for Lori and Mark and not even that for me. Lori’s face fell, but she was quick to defend him.

“Mrs. Kilbourn, that is just not like Soren Eames. He is usually so friendly. I think he must be mourning Mr. Boychuk’s passing, too.”

“I suppose he met Andy when Andy came to visit Carey.”

She stood very straight and looked directly into my face. “I don’t know about that. All I know is that Mr. Boychuk came to see Soren almost every week, and lately a lot more than that. They were very close.”

“Lori, I don’t think we should be talking about this – even with Mrs. Kilbourn. When a man talks to his pastor, that’s just like when he talks to his doctor. There’s a trust there, like an oath.”

Lori looked so shattered that I jumped in. “I guess,” I said, “that he came to talk about Carey.”

Mark was silent. “I guess if you two are going to talk about this, Carey and I better go down to Disciples and get a Popsicle. Lori, I’ll see you and Clay at home for lunch.” He kissed his son and wife and pushed the wheelchair toward the road to the restaurant.

Lori was solemn. She was attempting to analyze something, and it went against the grain. “Mrs. Kilbourn, please forgive me but I think you’re wrong. Mr. Boychuk never really spends – spent much time with Carey. I mean he was like good to him and all that but, you know, Mrs. Boychuk would spend like hours with Carey – watching
TV
with him and talking to him about the programs and reading to him and telling him about things, but Mr. Boychuk – well, you could tell he, like, loved Carey and everything, but it just seemed real hard for him to stay with him. He’d come in and he’d sit and hold Carey’s hand for a little while and then it was like he couldn’t take it any more. He’d kiss him and he’d
just leave. No, Mrs. Kilbourn, Mr. Boychuk didn’t come for Carey. Anyway, Soren is the spiritual head of Wolf River Bible College and all, but he wouldn’t have been the one to like talk to about Carey – that would have been …” Suddenly a laugh as musical as the tinkle of a wind chime. “Well, of course, it would be Mrs. Manz. She’s the matron for special care – sometimes I can be so dumb.” She smiled shyly, waiting for approval.

I gave it heartily. “Well, thanks, Lori, that’s good to know. It was kind of you to go to so much trouble.” We both smiled – neither of us seeing a barb in a comment that equated human thought with trouble, and we parted friends.

I didn’t make a conscious decision to call on Soren Eames. It just happened. I’d turned down Lori Evanson’s invitation to have lunch at their trailer and walked down the path that led to the chapel. Close up, it seemed to change, to reveal itself. Somehow up close you didn’t notice the hard-edged bravado of the building as much as the simple fact that everything fit so well.

The Charlie Appleby Prayer Centre was a fitting building in both senses of the word. The parts fit together with the cool inevitability of a beautiful and expensive watch. The result, as I discovered when the front door opened to my touch, was a building where form and function meshed smoothly. It was a fitting building in which to worship God.

The heart of the building, the octagon-shaped chapel, was a beautiful room. No stained glass or groined wood or silky altar cloths – just a room in which everything was practical and workable. All eight walls were glass – eight walls of windows filling the room with natural light. In the centre of the room was a simple circular altar. Suspended above it was an unpainted metal cross. Arranged in octagons around the altar were bright metal pews, covered in sailcloth cushions. The sailcloth was vivid: red, green, yellow, blue. I walked
down the aisle and sat in a pew. From there I could see how pieces of pipe had been joined together to form the cross. It looked functional and heavy. Suddenly, everything caught up with me. Exhaustion and grief and the familiar clutch of panic. There had been other deaths: my grandparents, my best friend from high school, my father, my husband. I had survived, but as I watched the play of light on the cross, I began to tremble.

I sat for perhaps half an hour. There were no tongues of flame. No pressure of an unseen hand on my shoulder. But after a while I felt better – not restored but capable of functioning.

“I am going to make it through this day,” I said. There were no thunderbolts, so I picked up my bag and walked.

I don’t know which I heard first – the man’s voice or the sobbing. But as I stepped outside the chapel, squinting against the harsh midday light, I heard someone in distress. The sound was coming from one of the wings – modules, Lori had called them – that radiated from the chapel like spokes from a wheel. The crying was terrible. It seemed to spring from a pain so pure and so private that I knew there was no help I could offer.

But there was another sound – the sound of a man’s voice. At first, I couldn’t catch the words, but I didn’t need to. The cadences were as familiar to me as my own, and I listened with my heart pounding against my ribs as the sounds shaped themselves into words. “I thought it was the right thing to do, but now I don’t know.” Then something I couldn’t make out, then, “It would have been kinder if I’d used a bullet.” The voice was tight with anguish. “Why can’t we go back? Oh, God, Soren, why can’t we go back?”

Then nothing except the blood singing in my ears and the knowledge that the voice I was listening to was Andy Boychuk’s.

I turned and walked to the double doors of the wing where the voice was coming from. When I came to the office marked Soren Eames, I didn’t bother to knock. Out of breath and close to hysteria, I opened the door.

There wasn’t much to see – a slender man with a receding hairline and on the desk in front of him a portable tape recorder clicking metallically to signal that the tape had ended. I don’t know what I’d expected. I was sick with anger and disappointment.

I went over and pulled the tape out of the recorder. I had a hundred like it myself: small, cheap tapes that Andy used, when he was driving, to record an idea or his impression of a meeting or sometimes just the thoughts he had driving late at night across the prairie.

“Where did you get this?” I asked.

Soren Eames’s voice was so low I could barely hear it. “He gave it to me.”

“What’s it supposed to mean? All that about ‘the right thing to do’ and using a bullet.”

Soren Eames looked steadily at me, but he didn’t answer.

My voice was shrill in the quiet room. “I asked you a question. Why have you got that tape? What’s it all about?”

“It’s a private communication.” He stood and walked over to me. “I’d be grateful if you’d leave me alone now.” His voice was gentle. He took my arm and led me down a corridor, through a door and into the light. For a few seconds, Soren Eames and I stood on the threshold looking into one another’s faces with the intensity of lovers. I don’t know what we were looking for – clues, I guess, some sort of insight into what had suddenly gone so wrong. Finally, I turned and began to walk down the path toward the highway.

“Mrs. Kilbourn,” he called after me, “when you’re working through all this, try to remember that you’re not the only
one. Other people loved Andy, too.” It was only later that I realized he had called me by name.

There was one cab waiting outside the Regina bus depot, and I beat out an old lady for it. I’m not proud of that, but there it is. As the cab pulled away, I looked out the rear window. She was standing on the corner shaking her bag at me.

It was two-thirty when the taxi pulled up in front of my house on Eastlake Avenue, less than twenty-four hours since Andy’s death. Our dogs greeted me hopefully, and I remembered that I hadn’t taken them for their run that morning.

“Sorry, ladies,” I said, “it’s shower time. You can come up and bark your complaints through the bathroom door.” They did. By 2:35 I was in the shower, and by 3:00, clean and cool in a fresh cotton nightgown, I was lying on top of my bedspread fast asleep.

It was late in the afternoon when I woke up. The room was full of shadows, and my son Peter was standing by the bed with a glass of iced tea. He is a handsome boy, dark like his father with the Irish good looks all the Kilbourns have. His sister, Mieka, thinks it’s a crime that she looks like me: “blond and bland” are her exact words. She’s right, but Peter carries his own burdens. At sixteen, he is as shy as Mieka and my younger boy, Angus, are outgoing. The political life with its endless rooms full of strangers has always been torture for him, yet he has walked into those rooms and offered his hand without grumbling. He is wonderfully kind with our dogs, with his sister and brother and with me. The tea was just the kind of thing he would do.

He sat on the edge of my bed. “Mieka’s down there making dinner. It looks kind of gross but it smells okay.”

“What’s she making?”