The Early Investigations of Joanne Kilbourn (70 page)

“Anyway, I didn’t do her,” Darren Wolfe was saying. He had turned his attention to Jill. Conversation with me was pointless; I couldn’t get him a deal with the network.

He leaned forward so that his forehead was almost touching the glass divider. His mouth was sullen, and his eyes were angry. “They haven’t got anything,” he said. “I knocked her around a few times, but it wasn’t personal. Jesus, everybody fought with that bitch. Anyway, I don’t do girls.” He looked quickly around the room to see who was there. Then he lowered his voice. “Look, the truth is, I haven’t got any bodies.”

“What?” I asked.

He looked at me, exasperated. “I haven’t got any bodies.” He moved closer and dropped his voice. “I’ve never killed anybody.” Having confessed the worst, he was restored. He straightened up, and his mouth curled into arrogance. “So, Jill,” he said, “I’ve got some things to say that you oughta hear.”

For the next twenty minutes Darren Wolfe gave us a conducted tour through the world of the Little Flower murders. I felt as if I’d stepped through the looking glass. The world Darren described, casually violent, retributive, vicious, seemed in every way alien from my own. But it wasn’t. The streets Darren Wolfe drove on in the course of his business day were the same streets I drove on; the street corners his girls worked were the street corners I walked past; the hotels
and apartment blocks where they turned tricks were part of my landscape. By the time he finished, I was badly shaken, and he saw that.

One thing Darren Wolfe knew was women. He wanted me on his side, and he knew I wasn’t. When Jill and I stood up to leave, he reached toward me, flattening his fingertips against the Plexiglas the way prisoners do in movies.

“Look,” he said, “I know you think I should be all broken up about Bernice. I can live with that, but before you write me off, you’ve gotta understand one thing. Bernice wasn’t like the kind of girls you know. Girls like Bernice, they ask for it.”

“Girls like Bernice …” As I walked to the car, Darren Wolfe’s dismissal pounded in my head. As I opened the door on the passenger side, I remembered another judgement. Hours before she died, Christy Sinclair had sounded the same chord of death, justice and dismissal: “When girls like Bernice die,” she had said, her voice trembling, “it’s just biological destiny … They’re born with a gene for self-destruction.”

Jill didn’t say anything till we were pulling out of the prison parking lot. “Sorry you came along?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “Just in a state of shock. How does a boy like that live with himself?”

“He sees himself as a businessman, Jo. Out there like the other guys, showing a little hustle, operating in accordance with the laws of supply and demand. I’ll bet you a hundred dollars he sleeps like a baby.”

“I’ll bet his girls don’t,” I said. I was wearing the silver bracelet Christy had given me, and my finger traced the lines of the Celtic letters. “Wandering Soul Pray For Me.”

“How do you break the cycle?” I said. “How can you make it possible for people to have good lives?” Kim Barilko’s face, mascara-streaked, defiant, flashed before my eyes. “Every
time I wear this goddamn stuff, somebody makes me cry.” How many times, I thought. How many times had someone made Kim Barilko cry?

I remembered the light in her eyes when she’d talked about all the things Christy Sinclair was going to teach her. Then I remembered the derisive curve of her lip as she talked about how stupid she had been to believe anything good could happen to her.

Fifteen seemed pretty young to be giving up on life. I turned to Jill. “How would you like to be a mentor?” I asked.

“Yours, Jo? Finally admitting you need some guidance? I’d be delighted. You can start by throwing out all those sensible shoes you’re so fond of.”

“I’ll do that,” I said. “But actually the person who needs someone to be her teacher, guide and friend is a lot more adventurous in her clothing than I am.”

When I finished telling her about Kim Barilko, Jill didn’t hesitate. “I’d be honoured, Jo. I really would. But not today. Listen, I’ve decided I’m going to really move on this Little Flower case. I’ve tried to get Toronto to give me a budget for this, but they say, with restraints and all, we should be doing upbeat stories with wide audience appeal. ‘Celebratory’ was the word my immediate superior used, I believe. Anyway, give me the weekend to see if any of Darren’s leads pan out. First thing Monday morning I’ll go over to the Lily Pad, and we can get started.”

“Jill, would you mind if I went over there after lunch and talked to her? I hate to think of Kim going through the weekend without some good news.”

“Of course I don’t mind. Maybe she’d like to come to my office Monday. I could show her around and take her for lunch in the cafeteria. Most kids get a kick out of watching the people they’ve seen on
TV
eat their tuna fish sandwiches.”

“Thanks, Jill.”

“For what? Trying to redress the balance a little? Don’t you think it’s about time?”

I picked Taylor up at school. “Samantha’s birthday party,” she said as she got in the car. “It’s today. Do we have a present?”

“Wrapped and on the dining room table,” I said.

“What is it?”

“An onion tree. Every time Sam takes off an onion, two more will grow in its place.”

Taylor looked into my face. “That’s a joke, right?”

“That’s a joke, right!” I said, and we both laughed.

After lunch I was in the front yard watering the geraniums when Taylor came out. She was carrying the birthday present, and she was wearing a pink party dress, her baseball shirt, baseball socks and runners.

“How would you like a mentor to advise you about your clothes?” I said.

She grinned at me.

I didn’t fall for it. “T., you’re going to have to change,” I said. “Why didn’t you wear what I put out for you?”

“Because I felt happy,” she said.

It was the first time she had said that since her mother died. If I’d had a party dress and baseball socks handy, I would have worn them myself. I reached down and took her hand.

“Good enough,” I said. “Let’s go to Samantha’s party.”

After I dropped Taylor off, I drove downtown to the Lily Pad. Not much had changed. The wooden frog still sunned himself on the lawn, and the kids still smoked on the steps. When I walked past them, they looked at me incuriously through dead eyes. The front door was open and I went in. Someone had tacked up a sign on the Sharing Place: “Global
thought for the day: Have a birthday party for the world.” On the
TV
in the living room, Oprah was talking about relationships; no one was watching. I kept on going. The state-of-the-art kitchen was gleaming and empty. On the counter, what looked like twenty pounds of standing rib roast thawed on a tray.

I was trying to decide what to do next when my friend Helmut came in. I hadn’t liked him the day before and I didn’t like him now. He was wearing a sweatshirt that said, “Let Me Be Part of Your Dream.” When he greeted me, his smile was as dazzling as ever, but there was no mistaking the hostility in his eyes.

I gestured toward the rib roast. “Good groceries,” I said.

He moved between me and the meat. Incredibly, it seemed as if he was trying to keep it a secret.

“Don’t hide it,” I said. “You deserve praise. Not many drop-in centres for runaways serve prime rib.”

“I thought I shared the rule about visitors the last time you were here, Joanne,” he said.

“You know my name,” I said. “Who told you?”

The smile was even more forced. “I don’t think that’s something you need to know.”

“I think it would help us relate,” I said. “Caring people shouldn’t have secrets from one another.”

“Kim told me,” he said.

Not in a million years, I thought. But I smiled at him. “Well, Kim is the person I’ve come to talk to.”

He gestured to the empty kitchen. “As you can see, she’s not here.”

“Do you expect her back soon?”

Helmut shrugged. “The kids who come here are dysfunctional, Joanne. They aren’t big planners. People come. People go. It’s called a transient population.”

“What about your mentor program?” I asked.

I could see the muscles in his neck tighten, but his smile grew even wider. “That’s one of our few failures. We had to abandon it. There were too many jealousies. Adolescent girls tend to be emotionally labile.”

“Pretty sudden decision, wasn’t it?” I said. “I’m sure Kim Barilko wasn’t the only young woman who was looking forward to having a chance at a different kind of life.”

Helmut Keating looked at me stonily. “We have programs here at the Lily Pad,” he said, “as you would have discovered if you’d read the brochures I gave you.”

“How can the programs help Kim when you don’t know where she is?” I asked.

Helmut narrowed his eyes.

“Just asking,” I said. “I don’t think we’re communicating very well here, Helmut. Maybe I’d better let you get that million-dollar roast in the oven. Is there someplace I could leave a message?”

“The Sharing Place,” he said tightly.

I wrote a note to Kim, telling her that a friend of mine who worked in television was interested in meeting her, and I left my name and phone number. I pinned it right under “Have a birthday party for the world.”

That night Keith called and we went to a new East Indian restaurant. We ate samosas and curried shrimp and groped at each other under the table. It was a nice evening, and it seemed to usher in a nice weekend. Saturday morning the kids and I enrolled Taylor in a summer art class at the old campus, then we went downtown and shopped for the endless items on Angus’s camp list. In the afternoon, I sat on the deck and read political journals while Taylor and her friend Samantha splashed around in the pool.

Sunday evening I went to the shower Lorraine was giving
for Mieka. It was the first time I’d been inside Lorraine’s Regina apartment. The floor plan was the twin of Keith’s, but the decor was coolly modern – all white. The only touches of colour in the room were the silvery wrapping paper of the gifts piled high on the table beside the window, the pink of the sweetheart roses that bloomed from a crystal bowl beside the chair for the bride-to-be, and the ice-cream pastels of the dresses the guests were wearing.

It was an evening that unfolded itself impressionistically, in a series of flashes that somehow revealed the whole. The rosy pink of the cold lobster in the seafood salad was the same shade exactly as the chilled rosé Lorraine handed around in her delicately fluted glasses. Lorraine’s friends, brilliantly fashionable, talked in throaty voices about new cars and old boyfriends or old cars and new boyfriends; no one seemed to care which. My daughter, who had always despaired of her looks, bloomed into beauty as she breathed in air perfumed by spring roses and listened to her friends’ gently mocking talk of love.

There were other flashes, equally sharp but more unsettling: the faint shudder of distaste that ran through Lorraine Harris’s body when she overheard Jill and me talking about my visit that day to the Lily Pad. Lorraine’s eyes, stern behind her horn-rimmed glasses, as she laughingly warned me against raising unpleasant topics at my daughter’s wedding shower. The two elegant women, friends of Lorraine’s, who heard me mention Helmut Keating’s name and came over to gossip about him and the Lily Pad.

“Of course, I’m on the board,” said the first woman, “so I see a fair bit of Helmut. He’s a bit too free with the jargon, but he works hard and the kids seem to love him. He’s a very caring guy.”

The second woman, who had had several glasses of rosé, roared. “And don’t forget that fabulous streaking job. Now
whoever did that is an artist. I think there’s a song there,” she said. “Helmie has great hair and it’s only fair ’cause he’s a very caring guy.”

The first woman smiled and took her friend’s arm. “Time to say good night,” she said. And they did.

And one last vignette. Just before the party broke up, there was a knock at the door; it was Blaine Harris. I could see his nurse, Sean, waiting in the hallway, but Blaine propelled his own wheelchair across the room and handed Mieka a long blue jeweller’s box, tied with a white ribbon. Mieka opened it, held the gold locket that was inside up for everyone to see, then fastened the chain around her neck.

The old man watched intently, then made a saluting gesture to Mieka and wheeled himself through the door into the hall. The whole scene couldn’t have taken much more than a minute, but by the time Blaine Harris left, there wasn’t a dry eye in the room.

It was a nice moment, and as I walked home, warmed by that memory and by other memories of the glowing party, I decided it was time to stop worrying about the things I couldn’t change and to start cherishing the good things in my life.

During the next week I tried. I read; I went over to the
TV
station and watched tapes of politicians and press conferences and pundits; I took Taylor to two art galleries to see new exhibits; I shopped and made the final purchases on Angus’s camp list. I even bought a mother-of-the-bride dress in aquamarine silk. Mieka was so relieved she took me out for ice cream and a movie. It was a week in the life of a lucky woman. And every night before I slept I could feel Christy’s bracelet burning warm on my wrist; every morning when I stretched for the day, I could feel the bracelet’s weight heavy on my arm.

I found I made detours. I took not the shortest route between stops but the one that would take me close to the Lily Pad where I could run in and check the Sharing Place. “Have a birthday party for the world” gave way to “Wave to a bird because you cannot fly,” then “Wake up early and dance for the sunrise,” but there was never a message for me from Kim. Three times I went to the bridal store where I had come upon Kim by chance the day after Christy’s funeral. I ached to see her. I ached to right the wrong I had done to Christy. I ached to redress the balance.

Monday, June third, I did the first television show. Keith picked me up and we drove to the studio together at five-thirty. We walked through the glass and steel lobby with pictures of the network stars suspended from the ceiling like the banners of medieval knights. A young woman, slender and fashionable in a black jumpsuit and odd socks, one pink, one turquoise, led us along corridors to an underground room where another young woman put makeup on us. She looked at Keith’s solid pale-blue suit approvingly and flicked his face with a powder puff. When it was my turn, she said my makeup was pretty good. She did some deft things with eyeshadow. “Brown is always more natural looking,” she whispered. She touched my earlobes with blush, then stood back and looked at me appraisingly. I had bought a new dress for the show, flowered silk, pretty as a summer garden.