The Early Investigations of Joanne Kilbourn (80 page)

Frogs. Dozens of frogs, big and little, smiling and sad, dozens of frogs for Angus because I wouldn’t let him take any home to the city with us.

We were almost ashore. Through the trees I could see the outline of a low building that looked like a motel. I started to fold up Taylor’s frog picture. There was writing on the back of the page. The writing was familiar. I had seen it on the front of a hundred shell-pink envelopes the night Lorraine Harris and I addressed the wedding invitations. Here, in her familiar looping backhand, were the names of the players on the croquet teams the night of the engagement party.

The Jacks: Joanne, Keith, Angus, Taylor.

The Aces: Peter Kilbourn, Theresa, Mieka, Greg.

I read the names again. She had written “Theresa,” not “Christy.” It was impossible. That night none of us knew who Christy Sinclair really was. Except Lorraine Harris had known.

With a jolt, the boat hit the dock and Jackie jumped ashore.

For a moment, I didn’t move.

Jackie Desjarlais must have seen the bewilderment in my face. He reached his hand out and pulled me ashore.

“Come on,” he said gently. “It’s time to go get Little Sister.”

As we moved from the dock to the shelter of the trees, I felt as if I was in a dream. As suddenly as it had begun, the wind had stopped, and there was a preternatural calm on the island. The air was dense with moisture, and as we moved toward the building, the ground was spongy beneath our feet. In the motionless air, every leaf and stone was thrown into sharp relief. It was a hushed and menacing world.

I leaned close to Jackie Desjarlais. “Where would they have her in there?” I asked. “Is there some sort of security?”

Jackie shrugged. “A guy I know says they don’t need much because of being on an island. He works there nights sometimes, in case things get out of hand. But from what I’ve seen, during the day it’s pretty much just the girls.”

“Then we could go in and take Taylor,” I said.

“I don’t think that’d be a smart move,” he said. “Let me check things out in there first.” He took the flask of whisky out of his jacket pocket and held it to his lips. Then he offered it to me.

“Later,” I said. “After we get her back.”

He started to put the cap on the bottle, then he changed his mind. He poured some rye into his hand and patted it on his cheeks as if it was aftershave. Then he wiped his hand on the front of his shirt.

“My disguise,” he said. “Nobody worries about a drunk. I oughta know.” He slid the bottle carefully into the inside pocket of his jacket. “I’m gonna go in there and make a stink. It won’t be the first time. Anyway, if there’s security, that’ll flush ’em out. At least we’ll know what we’re dealing with. Unless you got a different idea.”

I shook my head.

“Okay,” he said. “Stay outta sight till I get back. Then, if it looks good, we’ll both go in.”

I watched him lope across the clearing between the trees and the building; his legs were as long and as graceful as Theresa’s. The sun came out, pale through the clouds. It seemed like a good omen. I walked among the trees until the Lily Pad was in my line of vision. Taylor was in there. I was sure of it.

The building looked reassuringly ordinary, like a motel or a private club. It was made of cedar, low-slung, sprawling, ranch style. There were a few windows; all were placed high, but there were skylights set into the roof, so there would have been light inside. I seemed to be standing at the side of the building. I moved around so I could see the back. There was a tennis court there, and playground equipment: a jungle gym, a swing set, a teeter-totter. I thought of someone ordering that gym set. (“No, it’s not for my own children, it’s for company.”) The banality of evil. That’s what Hannah Arendt had called her book about the men at the top of the Third Reich. The men who came here would be like those men, good to their dogs, fond of gardening, devoted fathers, even, and yet … I remembered the magazine photographs I had
seen a little more than an hour ago, and my stomach clenched. What dark fantasies had been acted out on those swings? On that jungle gym?

A woman came from the front of the house and began walking toward the tennis court. She was pushing an industrial broom, the kind people use to sweep the water off a court after a rainstorm. Everything about the woman was shapeless: her body in its flowered cotton dress was a mass of shifting contours; her bare legs were pale and lumpy; her ankles were thick and swollen; even the way she walked, with the shambling gait of the lifelong alcoholic, lacked definition. Give this sad woman a bottle a day, and she wouldn’t question anything.

Things were starting to come into focus. The elaborate security system on the back door of the Lily Pad in Regina. The locked doors to the upstairs. (Not safe, Kim had told me, the kids might smoke up there. It was a fire hazard.) But it wasn’t fire the people who ran the Lily Pad were afraid of. They recruited from the street kids, lured them with the promise of a good life. (“Theresa was going to teach me about clothes and hair,” Kim said, her face transformed, “and we were going to talk about going back to school. She had this business, and she was going to train me …”)

A business. It sounded so innocent, like a bed and breakfast. I remembered the shining kitchen in the Lily Pad on Albert Street, so out of sync with the rest of that mismatched furniture scrounged from the Sally Ann. Then I remembered Helmut Keating trying to keep me from seeing a twenty-pound roast thawing in a pan on the counter. Prime rib. Nothing but the best for the Lily Pad’s customers.

How many Lily Pads were there? I thought of the water lilies in the pond by our cottage when I was young. The flowers were beautiful, white and luminous, but when I looked underneath I could see they grew from thick, creeping
stems that were buried in the mud at the bottom of the stagnant water. They slimed my hands when I touched them.

I heard a door slam, and Jackie came stumbling around the corner, a parody of a drunk. He picked up speed as he came toward me.

“There’s nothing but the girls there. We’re okay. I’ve been trying to come up with something. How does this sound? I go back up there and get everybody crazy and you try the doors at the back of the house. Start with the one closest to us. It’s a kind of storeroom. I’ve delivered booze there sometimes. No one ever seems to worry much about locking it. The locks are on the side where they keep the kids.”

I felt a rush of adrenaline. I wanted to find the people who had put the locks on those doors.

Jackie reached into the inside pocket of his jacket. When he pulled his hand out, he was holding a gun. “I sort of borrowed this from the guy who sold me the gas for the boat. He keeps it around in case of trouble. I figured we were more likely to have trouble today than him.” He held the gun out to me. “You take it,” he said. “If things get hot, just wave it around. Guns scare the shit out of people.”

As I took the gun, my hand was trembling. “They scare the shit out of me,” I said.

Jackie looked at me levelly. “You’ll be all right,” he said. He pointed to the woman sweeping the tennis courts. “As soon as she leaves, we’ll go in.”

It seemed like forever, and as we stood in the breathless mugginess of a July afternoon, I was half crazy with the thought of Taylor alone – or worse, not alone – in that malignant place. Jackie’s gun, a dead weight in the pocket of my slicker, seemed to grow heavier as the minutes ticked by.

Finally, the woman picked up her broom and went toward the front of the house. As soon as she was out of sight, I
curled my fingers around the handle of the gun and ran across the clearing. The first door at the back was metal, but it had been propped open with a wedge of wood. I opened it and found myself in a storage room. It was all very domestic and disarming. Facing me were two restaurant-size upright freezers. Next to them, in a kind of bin, were sacks of vegetables. Cartons of liquor were neatly stacked against the wall farthest from the door. There was a whole wall of canned goods. When I saw a low shelf near the front filled with tins of Spaghettios, I could feel the anger rising in my throat. I moved cautiously through the storeroom until I came to the kitchen. It was sleek and deserted.

The door was open and I could hear raised voices. One of the voices was male, demanding money, hollering obscenities. Jackie Desjarlais was putting on quite a performance.

I stood, tense, alert, trying to get a sense of the layout of the building. I moved quietly toward the voices and then at the first corridor I turned. Terrified I would make a mistake, I almost did.

She seemed to fly out of the door across from me. If she hadn’t been looking toward the disturbance, Lorraine Harris would have seen me. But her mind wasn’t on me. She looked preoccupied and grim. As she ran down the hall toward the trouble, her beautiful hair, knotted low on her neck, came loose. It made her look oddly girlish and vulnerable.

She had left open the door to the room she’d been in. I could see the screen of her computer. She hadn’t had time to turn it off. I stepped closer. On the screen was a list of files. She had been deleting files, getting rid of evidence. Give us twenty-four hours, the note had said. Whatever these records were, they were important; I could use them as leverage to get Taylor. I tapped in the top code on the screen: spread sheets of financial records. Too complex. I tapped in the next code. More bookkeeping. I ran the list. Suddenly, I saw the
code “teddy.” The password Helmut Keating had told Jill to use to get into the Lily Pad computer.

The image of the teddy bear tattoo on Bernice Morin’s left buttock flashed through my mind. Christy Sinclair had a teddy bear, too. I had seen it at the funeral home the night Mieka left me alone with Christy’s body. The tattoos must have been a way of identifying the children as the property of the Lily Pad, a mark of possession like the brands burned into the flanks of cattle.

I typed the word
teddy
. Then I hit “Enter.” The screen sprouted the kind of chart businesses use to explain their management structure. I recognized most of the names on the lower tiers: civic leaders in our towns and cities; politicians; two virulently homophobic ministers of God. The second name from the top was Lorraine Harris’s. The top name was familiar, too: Con O’Malley, the president of Nation
TV
. My boss. Jill had said the fax telling her to hire me as a panelist on
Canada Tonight
had come from his office.

O’Malley had covered all the bases. It wasn’t hard to keep track of what I was doing from day to day. Lorraine was part of my family. And Jill was an employee of Nation
TV
. When her investigation of the connection between Bernice Morin’s death and the Little Flower murders hit pay dirt, Con O’Malley had bled her investigation dry by cutting off her money; then, when she persisted, he’d buried her in corporate busy work.

Busy work. That’s what my job on the political panel had been. A distraction for a meddlesome woman. I looked at the management chart on the computer. Nothing was distracting me now. I hit the print key. In that quiet office, the printer seemed to roar to life, but I didn’t have many options. The list had just finished printing when I felt a tug on the back of my slicker. I grabbed the gun in my pocket, and heart pounding, I turned. It was Taylor.

She was on the verge of tears, but she seemed all right. “I was beginning to get scared, Jo,” she said. “Greg’s mother said it was okay, but I was still getting scared.”

I held her close to me. I could feel her heart beating against my chest. When I kissed the top of her head I could smell the warm, little-girl smell of her.

“No one hurt you, did they?”

She stood back, surprised. “Why would anybody hurt me?”

I ripped the sheet out of the printer and grabbed Taylor’s hand. “Let’s get out of here.”

We started, then Taylor looked up at me. “I left my dolls,” she said. She ran and picked up her candy box. By the time she came back, Lorraine Harris was standing at the door.

Lorraine was breathing hard, and there were darkening half-moons of sweat in the armpits of her cream jacket. But she was composed. Her oversized horn-rimmed glasses were lying on the table by the computer. She walked over, picked them up and put them on. It was a good look: the businesswoman dealing with a crisis.

I stepped closer to her. “Hello, Lorraine,” I said. “Going out of business?”

She looked quickly at the computer, at the printout in my hand, then at my face. For a time she was silent; I could almost hear the wheels turning as she decided which approach to take.

Finally, she made up her mind. “You can thank me that Taylor wasn’t harmed,” she said.

“Thank you?” I repeated, incredulous.

Taylor had heard her name and was looking at Lorraine with interest.

“The original plan was … different,” Lorraine said.

There was a glassed-in space at the end of the room; it looked like a secretary’s office. I pointed to it. “Taylor, why
don’t you go and sit in there till Lorraine and I are through talking. It’ll be okay. You can see me, and I can see you.”

Taylor went without question. She could feel the tension in the air.

As soon as Taylor closed the door to the office, Lorraine began to speak. Her voice was low, almost hypnotic. “The best thing for everybody would be if you just took Taylor and left. I give you my word that the business will be shut down. I’d already started to close things out. The decision came from Con O’Malley, Joanne. He won’t go back on it. I’ll be frank. The whole situation is just getting too hot – too many loose ends, too many people asking questions.”

Her voice grew soft. “The Lily Pad is history, but our families aren’t, are they? They’re still making plans and thinking about the future. You have to protect them, Joanne. If you decide to be reasonable, no one will be hurt. Mieka’s and Greg’s wedding can be as perfect as you and I dreamed it would be. Keith’s reputation won’t be tarnished, and you’ll have a brilliant future with the network. Sometimes, it’s best just to walk away.”

I felt myself being pulled into her orbit. Mieka had told me that Lorraine had taken courses in effective communication. She’d gotten her money’s worth.