The Further Investigations of Joanne Kilbourn (56 page)

Tom looked at me incredulously. “Because I had a plan,” he barked. “What the police found when they walked into that room on Scarth Street was a scene perfectly calibrated to divert their attention away from all the questions I didn’t want asked.”

“But Kellee would have asked the right questions.”

Tom’s tone was almost dreamy. “She would have, and from the moment I heard that they’d found Reed’s body, I knew she’d be a problem. That’s why I was in my office that night – trying to come up with a solution. I hadn’t thought of a thing, then that stupid cow just came lumbering in.” As he remembered the night of March 17, it was apparent that Tom’s focus had drifted from the present. Wherever he was, he wasn’t in the elevator with me. I calculated the distance between me and the panel beside the doors. The buttons that would restart the elevator were seductively near. I moved closer.

“What did Kellee want?” I asked.

“Justice,” Tom said in a mockingly declamatory voice. “Revenge. Who the fuck knows? She was drunk, and she was half out of her mind because she’d just heard about Reed. It was so easy. There were some cases of beer in the Journalism lounge. I offered to get us a couple of bottles to drink while we talked things over. When Reed and I had had our meeting on Scarth Street, I’d added some secobarbital to the Dewar’s I’d brought for him to sip while we discussed my rehabilitation. There was enough left over to make Kellee’s beer a real powerhouse. It hit her like a bag of hammers. She started to cry. Then she asked me to take her home.”

I backed along the wall of the elevator till the panel of buttons was within striking distance. “But you didn’t take
her to Indian Head,” I said. “You dumped her in that farmer’s field.”

Tom shrugged. Suddenly he seemed bored by the turn the conversation had taken. When he dropped his glance, I shot my hand towards the panel of buttons. I thought Tom had lost interest in my movements, but I was wrong. As my finger touched the button for the mezzanine, Tom chopped my forearm with the edge of his hand in a gesture so violent it brought tears to my eyes.

“You knew Kellee would die if you left her there,” I said.

He brought his face close to mine. “And I couldn’t have cared less,” he said. “Because I’m not like Reed Gallagher. I
do
have balls.”

“And that’s where you found the courage to kill a man who thought of you as a son and a twenty-one-year-old woman who was too drunk and too drugged to find her way home.” I leaned toward him and whispered, “You really are piece of work, Tom.” Then I raised my knee and caught him square in the crotch. He yelped in pain, and fell to the floor. I reached past him and hit
M
for mezzanine. This time Tom Kelsoe was too busy moaning to rip my finger from the button. All the same, it wasn’t until the elevator began to move that I felt safe enough to cry.

My memories of the next few minutes are fragmented: sharp and separate vignettes as distinct as stills from a movie.

The elevator doors opened, and Jill and Rapti were there. So were five members of the police force, and a lot of people from the show. I was glad to see that one of those people was Troy Prigotzke who, in addition to being a nice guy, was a body builder. Beside me, Tom Kelsoe was struggling to his knees. When Troy saw him, he reached down, grabbed Tom’s jacket collar and dragged him into the lobby. Then in a smooth and effortless move, he lifted Tom up and handed
him to one of the cops. “I believe you have some interest in this piece of shit,” he said.

Rapti had a sweatshirt tied around her waist; she took it off and draped it around my shoulders. Then she took the sleeve and mopped at the blood on my face. “Poor Jo,” she said.

“I’m okay,” I said, but my tongue felt thick, and my words didn’t sound right.

As the police put the handcuffs on Tom Kelsoe, he shot Jill a pleading look. “You’ve got to help me, baby,” he said. Jill gave him a glance that was beyond contempt, and turned to me. “Let’s get out of here,” she said.

Before the police left, they offered to radio for someone to take Jill and me to the hospital to get checked out and then bring us downtown to make our statements. I asked if Constable Marissa Desjardin was on duty, and they said they’d see.

While we were waiting, I went over to a pay phone and called Sylvie O’Keefe to ask if Taylor could stay the night. After Sylvie and I made our arrangements, Taylor came on the line. I started to ask what she’d been up to, but she cut me off. “You sound funny,” she said.

“I have a nosebleed,” I said.

“But you’re okay.” I could hear the anxiety in her voice.

“I’m fine,” I said. “I’m just trying to be as brave as you were when you cut your hand. Now, you have fun, and I’ll pick you up tomorrow morning.”

Marissa Desjardin shuddered when she saw my face, but after the doctor in emergency had checked me over, he said nothing was broken and I’d live to fight another day. He said the same thing to Jill. When he went off to write a prescription for painkillers, Marissa Desjardin rolled her eyes and whispered “asshole” at his retreating back.

We were out of police headquarters in twenty minutes. Marissa Desjardin was a whiz at taking statements, and, as she said, she knew Jill and I were fading fast. It was a little after 8:00 when we walked through my front door.

After I’d helped Jill off with her coat, I said, “We can’t combine painkillers and Glenfiddich. Which would you prefer?”

“The Scotch,” she said. “And Carly Simon. Have you still got those old tapes of hers? The ones we used to listen to when we’d stay up and talk all night.”

“Of course,” I said. “I was just waiting for our next pyjama party.”

While Jill went after the Scotch, I got out the glasses and ice and checked the messages. The first one was from the Parents’ Committee at Taylor’s school, wondering if I could bring a pan of squares to the Kids Convention Monday night. The second one was from Angus. He and Camillo had gone to Sharkey’s to play pool, and he’d check in later. The third message was from Alex. It was a bad connection, and I could only catch snatches of what he said. But I heard enough to know that he had had car trouble somewhere outside of Meadow Lake and was waiting for parts. When I heard Alex’s voice, I instinctively raised my fingers to my face, wondering what he would see when he looked at me.

Jill came into the room just as the tape played its final message. It was Dr. Roy Crawford. “Your new kitten came through the surgery with flying colours,” he said. “You and Benny can pick him up on Monday.”

Jill looked at me quizzically.

“Don’t even ask,” I said.

I dropped a tape in my cassette player. As Carly Simon began to sing “Two Hot Girls on a Hot Summer Night,” Jill handed me a drink and raised her glass. “Life goes on,” she said, but there was a bleakness in her tone that made me
wonder whether she was wholly convinced that life going on was a good idea.

Jill and I listened to all my Carly Simon tapes twice that night, and we went through a fair amount of Glenfiddich. The combination seemed to help. Jill needed to talk, and I needed to hear what she had to say. The truth of the matter was I didn’t get it. I didn’t understand how a woman as smart and as competent as Jill could make herself believe she was in love with a manipulator like Tom Kelsoe, and I didn’t understand how, once the beatings began, she didn’t simply report him and walk away.

Every situation Jill described that night was a perfect fit for the pattern of abuse. Tom’s father had been a batterer whose frequent absences only served to underline the horror of his presence. When Tom’s father was away, the Kelsoe home was a happy one, but when he returned he was, by turns, demanding and cold. Tom could never measure up to the ever-shifting standards his father set for him, and he came to see his mother as his only anchor in a violent and unchartable sea of threats and violence. After enduring years of cruelty at her husband’s hands, Tom’s mother ran away with the first man who promised her safe haven. Tom was left with his father. He was devastated. As soon as he was old enough, he left home and began the search for his ideal: a woman who would never desert him, no matter what.

The first time Tom hit her, Jill had been dumfounded. She and Tom were, as Tom frequently asserted, the perfect match, complementary halves of a whole, logos and eros. Tom’s remorse when he saw Jill’s bruises the morning after the first beating had been so intense, Jill had feared he would harm himself. He’d come to her apartment that night with a bottle of expensive bath oil and a silk peignoir. As he bathed Jill’s bruised body, he had tearfully offered up his excuse: he was obsessed by the fear that his new book would fail and that
Jill would abandon him the way his mother had, the way everybody he’d ever counted upon had. And so she had forgiven him.

As Jill told me about her relationship with Tom Kelsoe, I tried hard to make some sense of it. I couldn’t. In my heart, I didn’t believe Jill could either. That night, as we talked, she was filled with guilt. She felt that, if she had acted, Tom could have been stopped before two lives had been lost. Her anguish about what might have been allowed me to ask the question I’d been haunted by. “If you didn’t want to involve the police,” I said, “why didn’t you come to me?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know. I felt so cut off. It was as if I was living on the other side of a glass wall.” Her eyes were miserable. “Jo, believe me, it’s not easy to let people see that you’ve allowed yourself to be victimized.”

After I showered the next morning, I flinched at the sight of my face in the bathroom mirror. When Angus and Taylor saw it, they were going to need a lot of reassuring. Before I took the dogs for their walk, I smoothed makeup over my bruises, swathed my head in a scarf, pulled up my jacket collar, and put on my largest dark glasses. As I gave my face a last anxious check before I left the house, the light began to dawn. Jill was right. It wasn’t easy to face the world as a victim.

When it was time to pick up Taylor, I let Angus drive. Before she’d taken a cab home to her apartment, Jill had made me promise that I wouldn’t get behind the wheel until I’d had a chance to recover. Besides, I didn’t want to face Taylor alone. Angus had done exactly the right thing when he saw my bruises. He had put his arms around me without saying a word. When we got to Sylvie O’Keefe’s house, Angus went to the door to get Taylor. As they walked towards the car, I could see him preparing her for what she was about to see. She looked scared, but she managed a
smile when I told her there was nothing to worry about. As soon as we got home, I gave Taylor a short but honest account of what had happened. After I’d finished, she asked me two questions: the first was, did I hurt; the second was, did the doctor think my face would ever look the way it used to look. I told her the answer to both questions was yes.

I spent Sunday recuperating. The most vigorous activity I undertook was to find my old bridal picture so Taylor could draw a portrait of me in my big dress to cheer me up. Jill arrived at dinnertime with two pizzas from the Copper Kettle: spinach and feta for the grown-ups, and everything but the kitchen sink for the kids. By the time I slipped between the sheets, I felt I was on my way to recovery, but when the dogs and I set out on Monday morning, it soon became apparent that one day of rest hadn’t been enough. I was bone-tired and we only made it part way around the lake before I gave it up as a bad job and came home. Rosalie Norman was sympathetic when I called in sick. She hadn’t seen the political panel Saturday night, but she’d certainly heard about it. News travels fast on a university campus.

When I hung up, the day stretched before me. There were a hundred things that needed my attention, but only two jobs I had to do. I called Roy Crawford and told him the kids and I would be in after school to pick up the new kitten; then I got down my cookbooks and began searching for a recipe for Nanaimo bars.

I deep-sixed Taylor’s plan to have Benny join us when we went to the vet’s, but she was too excited to put up more than a token protest. From the moment she saw the tortoise-shell, Taylor was filled with plans. “He and Benny will be best friends,” she said. “When I’m at school, they’ll play all the time.”

Angus rolled his eyes, but remained silent.

“Don’t expect too much of Benny, T,” I said. “His nose may be a little bit out of joint at first.”

“Not Benny,” she said confidently.

When we were leaving, the receptionist smiled at Taylor. “What are you going to call your kitten?”

Taylor didn’t miss a beat. “Bruce,” she said, and she headed for the car.

Benny’s reaction to Bruce surprised me. Apparently, there were depths of feeling in Benny that had been unplumbed. From the moment Taylor undid the blanket and placed the new kitten in front of him, Benny was devoted to Bruce. It was clear that I had seriously underestimated Benny, and every glance he gave me let me know it.

It was still light when Taylor and I set out for the Kids Convention. As we walked towards Lakeview School, we spotted other parents with other kids and other pans of Nanaimo bars. Taylor was buoyant with the combined excitement of Bruce’s arrival and of being out after supper on a school night. But as we crossed Cameron Street, she scrunched up her nose. “I wish Alex had got here in time for us to all go to school together.”

“Taylor, I wish you wouldn’t count on Alex making it tonight. Meadow Lake’s a long way from here, and it takes time to get car parts.”

Taylor’s gaze was untroubled. “He’ll be here,” she said. “He promised.”

The front hall of Lakeview School was hung with construction-paper stars. Inside each star was a student’s picture. In case we didn’t get the message, there was a sign in poster-paint script: “At Lakeview School, every student is a S*T*A*R!” After Taylor and I found her star, and Jess’s and Samantha’s and those of her seven other best friends, I said, “Let’s go see your Nanabush mural.”

“No,” she said. “It wouldn’t be fair. We have to wait for Alex. There’s other stuff.”

For the next half-hour, we looked at stuff: a fisherman’s net filled with oddly coloured papier-mâché fish made by the grade ones; First Nations masks made by the grade threes; family crests made by the grade sixes; poems about death and despair written by the grade eights.