The Further Investigations of Joanne Kilbourn (51 page)

Constable Desjardin sighed. “You’d be amazed at how often they are,” she said. She reached over and touched my
hand. “If you don’t mind my saying so, Kellee Savage was lucky to have a teacher like you.”

I tried a smile. “Thanks,” I said. “But you couldn’t be more wrong about that.”

After the squad car came for Marissa Desjardin, I sat in the Volvo, taking deep breaths and trying to shake off the existential horror that gripped me. It was an impossible task, and when the clock on the dashboard showed that ten minutes had elapsed, I gave it up as a bad job and headed for the house. Taylor met me at the front door. She was in her nightie, and I noticed she’d pinned her “Hospitals Are Full of Helpers” button to its yoke.

“How’s your hand?” I asked.

“It’s okay,” she said. “I was brave, wasn’t I?”

I put my arm around her. “Very brave.”

She moved closer to me. “It was nice of them to give me the button, but I hate hospitals, Jo.”

“Me too,” I said. “Let’s do what we can to stay away from them for a while.”

When Taylor wandered off to find Benny and take care of his final needs of the day, I went into the kitchen. There was a note in Taylor’s careful printing on the kitchen table. “Anna Lee called.” It took me a minute to connect Anna Lee with Annalie Brinkmann, but when I did I started for the phone.

As I picked up the receiver, the memory of Kellee’s ravaged face hit me like a slap, and a wave of dizziness engulfed me. I leaned against the wall. I wasn’t hungry, but I knew I had to eat. I poured the last of the won-ton soup into a bowl and stuck it in the microwave. The soup was good, and after I ate it, I felt better. Still, I knew that all the won-ton soup in the Kowloon Kitchen couldn’t make me strong enough for the task at hand. Annalie Brinkmann would have to wait. I rinsed my bowl and put it in the
dishwasher, then, with limbs that felt like lead, I walked to the phone and dialled Neil McCallum’s number.

Like many people confronted with brutal news, Neil’s first refuge was disbelief. “You could have made a mistake,” he said, “or the police could have. Everybody makes mistakes.”

When, finally, I’d convinced Neil that there was no mistake, that Kellee Savage was the woman in the photographs I’d seen, he grew quiet. “I’m going to hang up now,” he said. “I don’t want you to hear me cry.”

I didn’t try to dissuade him. Neil had announced his decision with great dignity. He knew what he was doing; besides, I was fresh out of what Emily Dickinson called “those little anodynes that deaden suffering.”

That night I couldn’t sleep. For hours, I lay between the cool sheets, watching the shifting patterns of the moonlight on my ceiling, breathing in air scented by the narcissi growing in pots in front of my open window, and wondering what kind of fate could decree that a twenty-one-year-old woman should die before she had known a lifetime of nights like this. When, at last, I drifted into sleep, the room was dark and the air had grown cold, but I still didn’t have an answer.

The first voice I heard the next morning came from my clock radio. The newsreader was intoning the final words of an all-too-familiar litany: “name withheld, pending notification of next of kin,” she said, and I knew my day had begun.

When the dogs and I set off for our run, the city was thick with fog. As we started across Albert Street, there wasn’t a car in sight. Obviously, most of Regina’s citizens were smarter than I was. While we were waiting for the light to change, I reached down and rubbed my golden retriever’s head. “Looks like we’ve got the world all to ourselves, Rosie,” I said. She looked at me with disdain; apparently, that morning, she regarded the world with as little enthusiasm as I did.

Our progress through the park was slow. There were patches of muddy leaves on the path that curved around the shoreline. The leaves were slick and we had to travel carefully to avoid a misstep. As we rounded the lake, Sadie began to whimper with weariness. I reassured her and slowed our pace even more. And so we headed home: a woman in middle age and her two old dogs, trying to find their way through the fog. It was a metaphor I could have lived without.

By the time I’d taken the dogs’ leashes off and fed them, I knew I was running on empty. It was time to shut down. I didn’t have classes that day, and there was plenty of work on my desk at the university that could just as easily be done at home.

When I looked into my closet, the prospect of selecting something to wear to the university suddenly became as daunting as a run in the Boston Marathon. Anyone I ran into that day was just going to have to take me as they found me. Unfortunately, the first person I ran into was Rosalie Norman.

When I came into the Political Science offices, she looked at my jeans and sweatshirt assessingly. “Are we having Casual Friday on Thursday this week?” she asked.

“I’ve decided to work at home today.”

Since the advent of her fatal perm, Rosalie had taken to wearing a series of hand-knitted tams. The tam
du jour
was the colour of powdered cheese and, as she framed her response to me, Rosalie tucked a wiry curl back under its protection.

“Must be nice to be able to work at home whenever you feel like it,” she said.

“I’m hoping it’ll be productive, too,” I said.

“I suppose you’ll want me to handle your calls.”

“If you don’t mind.”

“What do you want me to tell them?”

“Tell them I’ll call them tomorrow,” I said. “Or tell them to go hell, whichever you prefer.”

I walked out of the office, warmed by the pleasure of meanness. For the first time since I’d become a member of the Political Science department, I had rendered Rosalie Norman speechless.

One of the realities of university teaching is that mindless tasks are never in short supply, and it didn’t take me long to fill a file folder with work that demanded less than my complete attention. I had my jacket zipped up and I was on my way out the door when I saw Kellee’s tape-recorder on my shelf, waiting to be claimed. From the time she had asked permission to tape my lectures so she wouldn’t miss anything, I had never seen her without it. The tape-recorder had seemed an extension of Kellee, ubiquitous and imbued with her plodding, mechanical determination to complete the task at hand.

When she’d telephoned me from the Owl on the last night of her life, Kellee had bragged about getting “proof.” She hadn’t mentioned the tape-recorder, but Linda Van Sickle had.

I went to my shelf and took down the tape-recorder. Linda had said there’d been some sort of blowup when Kellee’s classmates had discovered she was taping their private conversations. I rewound the tape and pressed
play
, hoping, I guess, for some sort of revelation, but all I got were the sounds of a student bar on a Friday night: music; a burst of laughter; a drunken shout; more laughter. The first voice I was able to recognize belonged to a young woman named Jeannine who was in the Politics and the Media seminar, and who had told me on at least three separate occasions that I was her role model. As it turned out, she was talking about me again.

“If I’d known Kilbourn was such a bitch about not letting people express their own ideas I wouldn’t have taken her
fucking course. You know what she gave me on my last paper? Fifty-eight per cent! Just because I didn’t use secondary sources! I showed that paper to my boyfriend and a lot of other people. Everybody says I should’ve got an A.”

Unexpectedly, it was Jumbo Hryniuk who jumped to my defence. “Kilbourn’s all right,” he said. “She’s kinda like my coach – tough, but generally pretty fair.”

The conversation drifted to other subjects: exam schedules; a new coffee place downtown; the most recent movie at the public library. Then Jeannine was back, whispering sibilantly to Linda. “Doesn’t it piss you off,” she said, “that even though your marks are better, Val Massey’s probably going to get that
Globe and Mail
placement? And he’s only getting it because he sucked up to you-know-who. I know everybody brown-noses, but I hate the ones who get their nose right in there.”

Linda’s voice was mild. “Val’s not a brown-noser,” she said. “There’s no reason he can’t be friends with somebody on faculty.”

“If you ask me, I think it’s more than that,” Jeannine hissed. “I’d have too much pride to do what he’s doing, but it’s going to pay off. Wait and see.”

Someone whose voice I didn’t recognize joined the group, and the topic changed. I listened until the tape ended, but there were no more references to the
Globe and Mail
placement, and there were no more references to Val Massey.

As I walked to my car, Jeannine’s sour little discourse on brown-nosing was still on my mind. She had been wrong, at least in part. Not all students saw sucking up to professors as the surest route to academic success. Still, a surprising number did, and an equally surprising number of faculty members fell for student blandishments, hook, line, and sinker.

It was an old game, but Val Massey had never struck me as a player. The only faculty member Val had ever seemed close to was Tom Kelsoe, and that relationship was more complex than a simple friendship. At twenty-one, Val was a little old for hero worship and, to my mind at least, Tom didn’t fit the job description, but there was no mistaking Val’s unquestioning adoration. It had puzzled me until the day the kids and I had stopped at Masluk’s Garage in Regina Beach. Given Val’s father’s performance the day we saw him, it wasn’t surprising that Val had been desperate for someone to look up to.

All things considered I had a pretty good day. By mid-morning the fog had moved off and the sun was shining. I bundled up and took my work and my coffee out on the deck. Just before noon, Taylor called me into the house to show me her mural. Nanabush and the Close-Your-Eyes Dance was taking shape. Most of the time there wasn’t much I could do to help Taylor with her art, but giving her the Chagall book had obviously been an inspiration. I’d hoped Chagall’s “Flying Over Town,” with its magical mix of reality and myth, would help Taylor paint the picture she wanted to paint, and it had. The world she’d created with her poster paints seemed to me to be very like the world Alex Kequahtooway had conjured up for us on those winter evenings when we listened to the wind howl and felt the darkness come alive with his tales of the Trickster.

Taylor was eyeing me anxiously. “Do you think it’s any good?” she said finally.

“It’s terrific,” I said.

“Do you think Alex will like it?”

“I know he’ll like it. As Angus would say, it’s the smokingest.”

She didn’t smile. “Jo, when is Alex coming back?”

“Soon, I hope.”

“But you don’t know for sure.”

“No,” I said, “I don’t know for sure.”

After lunch, Taylor and I went to the mall to see the movie that was required viewing for everyone under the age of twelve that Easter. As I sat in the dark, smelling the wet-wool smell of little kids, watching the endless procession of parents and children moving up and down the aisles, slopping drinks, spilling popcorn, heading for washrooms, I felt my nerves unknot. The holiday matinee was familiar turf, and it was a relief, for once, just to sit back and watch the movie.

When we pulled up in front of the house after the movie, Angus and his friend Camillo were in the driveway, shooting hoops. I dropped Taylor off and went to pick up our dry cleaning.

Taylor was all smiles when I got back. “Guess who called?”

“I don’t know. You’re the one who was here. Why don’t you tell me?”

“Alex. He said to tell you he’s sorry he missed you and he’ll call again Saturday night. He and Eli …” She scrunched her face. “Who’s Eli?”

“Alex’s nephew. He’s the same age as Angus.”

“Anyway, Alex and Eli are going to some island up there. He says he’ll bring me a fish when he comes back.”

“Did he say when that’s going to be?”

“No, but guess what, Jo? I invited Alex to the Kids Convention to see the mural and he says wild horses couldn’t keep him away. That’s good, eh?”

“That’s more than good,” I said. “The Kids Convention is on the tenth – not long at all.”

Angus and I were upstairs looking for the shorts to his basketball uniform when Annalie Brinkmann called. As soon as I heard her pleasant contralto, I felt a twinge. “I’m
sorry,” I said. “I meant to get back to you. But when I got your message, I’d just had some bad news. I teach at the university here, and one of our students died.”

I could hear her intake of breath. “Not the one who was being harassed?” she said.

I felt as if I’d been kicked in the stomach. “How did you know about that?”

“Then it was her?”

“Yes,” I said. “The student who died was Kellee Savage.”

“Kellee Savage,” she repeated dully. “Reed didn’t tell me her name. And now he’s dead too.”

“Ms Brinkmann, how are you connected to this?”

“Through history,” she said heavily, “and through Reed Gallagher. I have to know – did that young woman – did Kellee Savage commit suicide? Because if he drove her to that …” Her voice broke. When she spoke again, it was apparent she was fighting for control. “I’m not an hysterical person, Mrs. Kilbourn, but this case has a special resonance. Twenty years ago, what happened to Kellee Savage happened to me.”

“Ms Brinkmann, you’re going to have to …”

She cut me off. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I know I’m being elliptical.” Her pleasant voice had gone flat. “I was in J school here in Toronto. Reed Gallagher was my instructor. Charges were made.” Unexpectedly, she sobbed. “Without ever seeing her, I can tell you what Kellee Savage was like. She worked hard. She took journalism seriously, and …” Annalie Brinkmann hesitated. “And she was ugly.”

“What else did Reed tell you?”

“Not much. He just left a message on my machine – said he was having a problem with a student, that she was accusing another student of harassment, and he was afraid there might be some truth to her charges. Then he said he thought, because of my history, I might be able to help him get to the truth.”

“Why would he drag you into this after twenty years? Did he just want your advice because what Kellee was going through was similar to what you’d gone through?”