The Wandering Soul Murders (9 page)

Mieka shook her head. “All Alisdair Harris left Lorraine and Greg was that place on the lake, mortgaged to the hilt, and a lot of angry creditors. Old Mr. Harris just about went broke himself trying to pay off his son’s debts. Keith tried to help, but Lorraine insisted she could do it on her own. And you know, Mum, when she was getting started in real estate, women had to be …” She hesitated.

“Men pleasers?” I said.

“Yeah, I guess. Lorraine still talks about having to use her womanly wiles. But to be fair to her, the kind of men you knew at the university and even in politics were more enlightened than some of the men Lorraine had to deal with. She’s done very well for herself, you know.”

“I know she has,” I said. “And I intend to smarten up.”

Mieka laughed. “See that you do. How was dinner?”

“Wonderful,” I said. “Anything I need to know about around here?”

“No. The kids had three Big Macs each and fries and milkshakes, then Angus made himself a grilled cheese sandwich before he went to bed. There were a couple of phone calls for Peter. Jill called for you. She’ll call tomorrow. I think that’s it. Except for a prank call. Someone called and made weird noises and then dropped the receiver. Probably some meatball friend of Angus’s.”

“Probably,” I said.

But I knew who had called, and I knew it wasn’t a prank. I climbed the stairs and went into the bathroom to get ready for bed. I looked at myself in the mirror. I looked like a woman who had just about been made love to. I smiled at my reflection. Then I remembered, and I stopped smiling. What had Blaine Harris seen in my face? What was there about me that had made him drag himself along the furniture in his bedroom and risk his health to call me on the telephone?

“Killdeer,” I said to my reflection. “Killdeer,” and I turned away and went to bed.

CHAPTER

6

As I dressed for Christy’s funeral the bedroom was dark. Since the early hours of morning, thunder had cracked and lightning had arced across the sky. Now the rain had come, steady and relentless. I smoothed the skirt of my black silk suit and checked my reflection in the mirror. The silver bracelet encircling my wrist gleamed dully – Christy’s bracelet, now mine.

Three days earlier, Mieka had sent the keys to Christy’s condominium to a friend in Saskatoon and asked her to go to Christy’s place and choose a dress for her to be buried in. The woman had found a simple cotton dress the colour of a new fern; the price and the care instructions were still pinned to the sleeve. When Mieka brought it to the house to show me, I’d shuddered.

“Your great-grandmother always said that a green dress was bad luck.”

Mieka had looked at me grimly. “I don’t think Christy’s luck could get much worse,” she had said.

Christy wore the green dress. I dreaded seeing her at the funeral home, but it seemed to come with the territory when you were next of kin. Mieka and I drove over together the morning before the funeral. We were silent as we looked at Christy. Finally, Mieka reached over and touched the bracelet on my wrist.

“We should put this on her, I guess,” Mieka said. “I never saw her without it until that last night.”

“She wanted me to have it,” I said.

“She did? But I thought …”

I turned it on my wrist so I could read the Celtic lettering. “Wandering Soul Pray For Me.” In that moment, I felt the bracelet’s power. Marcel Proust called these objects that are charged with independent life “Madeleine objects.” Sensible people don’t believe in such things, and I am a sensible woman, but from the moment I put it on, Christy Sinclair’s bracelet was both a reminder and a spur.

I turned to my daughter.

“Mieka, would you mind leaving me alone with Christy for a moment?”

Mieka looked apprehensive.

“I’m all right,” I said. “I just want to say goodbye.”

She left, and very quickly I stepped to the casket and reached my hand under the small of Christy’s back and half turned her. I pulled up her skirt. I could see the outline of the tattoo through the thin material of her panties, but still I had to know for certain. I pulled at the elastic waistband and slid Christy’s underpants down. On her left buttock was the teddy bear tattoo. It was exactly the same as the tattoo I had seen on Bernice Morin the morning after she was murdered. I pulled the skirt down and turned Christy onto her back again.

“What does it mean, Christy?” I said. “What does it mean?”

We took two cars to the funeral. Peter was going with Mieka and Greg, and I was going with Jill Osiowy and Keith Harris. When he phoned and asked what time he should pick me up, I had told him that he didn’t have to be part of that sad day. His voice on the other end of the line had been matter of fact. “I’m interested in the long haul, Jo,” he had said simply, and I’d thought that having Keith Harris with me for the long haul might not be a bad idea.

Planning the funeral had brought us face to face with all the unanswered questions of Christy’s life. Who were the people who cared about her? Beyond a few colleagues at the biology lab, there didn’t seem to be anyone. We had put a photo at the head of Christy’s obituary notice in the Saskatoon and Regina papers, hoping that someone who had known her before would see it and come. But it seemed a slim hope, and we had chosen the smallest of the chapels at the funeral home to avoid the depressing symbolism of empty pews. What were her favourite flowers? Her favourite pieces of music? No one knew. Pete remembered a couple of songs she’d commented on when they’d been listening to the car radio, but they were songs for the living.

What, if anything, did Christy Sinclair believe in? She had never said. Greg went down to the library and came back with two pages of quotes about the endurance of the human spirit.

“Is there anything there we can use for a eulogy?” he asked after I finished reading them.

I shook my head.

“That’s what I thought, too,” he said. “My high-school coach said stuff like that when he sent us back into a game where we were really getting nailed.”

“Thanks for trying,” I said. “I’ve got an idea about something that won’t sound quite so much like Vince Lombardi.”

I pulled down my volume of Theodore Roethke and looked for the poem with the image of the pickerel smile that I had always connected with Christy. The poem was called “Elegy for Jane”; Roethke had written it for a student who had died from injuries when she was thrown from a horse. I copied the poem out, and it was in my purse the day I walked through the door of Helmsing’s Funeral Home.

We had done our best. Still, as we filed into that tiny chapel with the empty pews and the tape of “Amazing Grace” whirring lugubriously in the background, there was no denying that Christy Sinclair’s leave-taking of this world was going to be a pretty lonely affair. But as the tape changed to “Blessed Assurance,” there was a stir.

Four young women had come in. Two were native, two weren’t, but they all shopped at the same store: stiletto heels, stirrup pants tight as a second skin on their slender legs, nylon jackets with their names embroidered on the sleeve and crosses around their necks. They were, without exception, pretty, but their hair, gelled and curled, frizzed and sprayed, was too extravagant for their young faces, and their eyes were too wary for girls who weren’t far along in puberty. They sat behind me. All during the readings I was aware of them; I could feel their presence, and I could smell the sweet heaviness of their hairspray, overpowering in the humid chapel air.

When it was time for me to read, I felt the familiar clutch of panic, but Keith smiled encouragingly and Christy’s bracelet was warm around my wrist. I walked to the front of the room and took a deep breath. I had read “Elegy for Jane” many times in the past twenty-four hours. I knew it by heart. As I said the lines, I looked at Christy Sinclair’s small band of mourners: at Jill Osiowy, head bowed, red hair falling forward to curtain her face; at Keith, whose eyes never left mine; at Greg, whose arm rested on my daughter’s shoulder as if by his touch he could protect her; at my adult children, backs ramrod straight but sitting so close together you couldn’t have passed a paper between them, reassuring one another as they always had that, no matter what, they had each other.

Behind them, the four young women listened to Roethke’s words with closed faces. The final stanza of “Elegy for Jane” had always seemed to me to be heartbreakingly beautiful.

If only I could nudge you from this sleep,
My maimed darling, my skittery pigeon.
Over this damp grave I speak the words of my love:
I, with no rights in this matter.

As I recited the words, one of the girls began to cry.

She wasn’t the only one. When I came to the last line of the poem, I was crying, too – for Roethke’s Jane and for Christy Sinclair who had no one but me to speak the words over her grave.

The rain hadn’t let up when we left the funeral chapel. There was a kind of portico outside the entranceway, and the young women were there in their thin jackets, looking up at the sky.

I went over to them. “Can we give you a lift anywhere?” I asked.

They stepped back from me as if I were an infection, but one of them, the tiny blonde who had wept during the poem, stood her ground.

“We’re okay,” she said.

I looked at her. Her peroxided curls were dark at the roots like Madonna’s, and her skin beneath its heavy makeup had the telltale bumps of pubescence. There were streaks of mascara down her cheeks from her tears. I took a Kleenex from my bag and held it out to her.

“Your mascara has run a little,” I said.

She grabbed the tissue and began scrubbing at the area under her eyes.

“Every time I wear this goddamn stuff, somebody makes me cry,” she said.

“Same here,” I agreed.

For a beat, the mask dropped, and she looked at me with real interest.

“Were you a friend of Christy’s?” I asked.

The girl’s face closed in on itself again, and she turned on her heel and stepped into the rain.

“Please, could we talk just for a moment?” I called after her.

She didn’t look back. The others followed her, and I was left on the steps of the funeral home watching the four of them clip along Cornwall Street in their perilously high heels. The rain kept on coming, plastering their stirrup pants to their legs, soaking their thin jackets, bouncing impotently off the gelled curls and the hard-sprayed frizz of their elaborate hairdos. Finally, they turned a corner and vanished into the mist of the rainy city.

There are 180,000 people in Regina. Chance encounters are not unheard of here; still, running into Kim Barilko less than twenty-four hours after talking to her outside the funeral home seemed like a cosmic stretch.

I had dropped Taylor off at nursery school and come downtown to do a couple of errands. Later I was going to pick Taylor up, help Pete get organized for the trip to Swift Current, then meet Mieka and Lorraine Harris at the bridal salon for Mieka’s first fitting on her wedding dress. A high-stress day.

I’d taken care of my business, and I was walking along Scarth Street toward the place I’d parked the car. The wet weather had continued. It was a grey muggy day, coast weather. There was a bridal shop on Scarth; in the gloom, its window, bright with paper apple blossoms and summer wedding gowns, was an appealing sight. I stopped to look. There was something surreal about all those mannequin brides in their virginal white. I could see my reflection in the window: a flesh-and-blood imperfect middle-aged woman in the midst of all that synthetic flawless youth. And then there was another reflection, just behind me: a young woman with the hips-forward slouch of a street kid and Madonna hair. I turned. For a split second she didn’t notice me, and I was able to see her face as she looked at that fairy-tale dress. Her mouth curved with derision, but her eyes were filled with terrifying hope. I didn’t want to see any more.

“Remember me?” I said. “We talked yesterday after Christy Sinclair’s funeral.”

She was wearing yesterday’s stirrup pants and a sleeveless blouse the colour of an orange Popsicle; her lipstick was that same improbable orange, but frosted. A cross hung between her small breasts.

“I remember you,” she said and she smiled. “You’ve got the same problem with Maybelline that I have.”

There was a Dairy Queen next to the bridal shop. “Could we have a cup of coffee together – my treat?” I asked. “I’d like to talk about Christy Sinclair a little if it’s okay with you.”

She shrugged her thin shoulders. “Sure, I’m not going anywhere. But her name was Theresa, not Christy.”

“Theresa?” I said.

“Like in Terry,” she said, “or the saint. If you hadn’t put the picture in the paper we wouldn’t have known it was her because of the wrong name.” She opened her bag and pulled out the obituary. She tapped at it with an orange fingernail.

“That’s Theresa,” she said.

“What was her last name?” I asked.

The mask fell over her face again. “Look, I don’t think I’ve got time for a coffee, after all.”

“Can I drive you somewhere or just walk along with you?”

“It’s a free country,” she said, and then more kindly she added, “I have to get to the Lily Pad and help with lunch. It’s my day.”

“Is the Lily Pad a restaurant?”

She laughed, a short, unpleasant sound. “Yeah, it’s a restaurant, a restaurant for people with no money.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Why?” she said. “You don’t have to eat there.”

We both laughed, and when she began walking toward Albert Street, I fell into step with her. “My name’s Joanne Kilbourn,” I said.

“I’m Kim Barilko,” she said.

She made good time, despite her stiletto heels.

“So,” I said, “how did you know Theresa?”

“From home and then at the Lily Pad,” she said. “She was going to be my mentor, but with my luck, of course, she goes and dies. I should have known better.” Kim’s lip curled with contempt at her gullibility.

“You’re going too fast for me,” I said. “Could you fill me in a little?”

“The Lily Pad is a place for runaways, street kids?” At the end of the sentence, her voice rose, and she watched my face for a sign of comprehension. When she saw what she was looking for, she continued. “They serve food and coffee and you can go there and watch
TV
or have a shower or just hang together. There’s a lot of system stuff, crafts and counsellors and programs to help you learn a job. It’s a hassle-free zone. Nobody’s allowed to dick you around, not your parents, not your old man, nobody.”

“Sounds good,” I said.

She shrugged. “And there are mentors. Girls who have good jobs and great clothes and great lives, and they come in and talk to us and then they choose someone to kind of help along the way. Terry chose me, because she wanted to help a girl from home. Besides, she said she saw something in me.”

“I can see it, too,” I said. “Incidentally, how old are you?”

“Fifteen,” she said.

A year older than Angus.

The Lily Pad was on Albert Street, not far from the city centre. It was an old house with the graceful lines of a building designed in the first years of the century. On the front lawn a wooden frog sunned himself on a lily pad. No words. On the grass and on the front steps, kids sat smoking. I had spent my life surrounded by children, but kids like these still tore at me. The dead eyes, the defiance, the sure knowledge that they were just putting in time before they entered their life’s work as members of the permanent underclass. When I thought about what lay ahead of them, it was hard to believe we’d inched very far along the evolutionary scale.

They moved aside to let us pass as we went up the front steps, but whether we were there or not there was obviously a matter of indifference to them. Kim didn’t comment about them or about anything. There was a bulletin board on the wall of the entranceway. Pinned to the top was a sign: “The Sharing Place.” The board was empty. A door to what must have been the upstairs was blocked off by an old pine sideboard.