A Colder Kind of Death (18 page)

Friday, I took Hilda to the Faculty Club for lunch before she drove back to Saskatoon. We ate liver and onions and made plans for Christmas. I loved her, but as I watched her manoeuvre her old Chrysler Imperial out of the university parking lot, I was relieved. Hilda was a hard person to deceive, and I was certain she knew I was concealing something critical from her.

I had three students to see that afternoon. When the last one left, I pulled the picture of the young woman and her baby out of my bag and propped it against my coffee cup. I tried Tess’s home number. There was no answer. I looked at the picture and I knew I was tired of waiting. It was time for action.

The receptionist at Beating Heart had a great smile, eyeglasses with bright green frames, and a sign on her desk that said,
I’M
M
ICHELLE, PLEASE BOTHER ME
. But she turned her face away when I held the picture up and asked her if she knew the woman who was sitting on Santa’s knee.

“We don’t discuss clients,” she said.

“Was this woman a client?”

Michelle pushed her chair back as if she was afraid I would force her to look at the picture. “I don’t know,” she said woodenly.

I moved closer to her. “This is important,” I said. And then I added, “It’s a matter of life and death.”

It was an unfortunate choice of words. Michelle leapt up from her desk and returned with an older woman who bore a startling resemblance to the actress Colleen Dewhurst and who looked as implacable as Colleen Dewhurst had looked when she played Aunt Marilla in
Anne of Green Gables
.

“Look,” I said, “I think I got off on the wrong foot here. I’m a friend of Tess Malone’s. I’ve been trying to reach her, but I can’t. I need to find this young woman.”

When the two women exchanged a quick, worried glance, the penny dropped. They thought I was the enemy.

“I’m not trying to get her to change her mind about going through with her pregnancy,” I said. “If you’ll look at the picture, you’ll see she already had her baby. It was at least six years ago. But I have to find her. It really is a matter of life and death.”

For the first time, the older woman smiled. She held out her hand. “I wish you’d said at the outset you were a friend of Tess’s. I think Michelle and I jumped to the wrong conclusion about you.” She spoke with a slight accent, pleasant and lilting.

“My name is Joanne Kilbourn,” I said.

“Irish?” she asked.

“My husband’s family were,” I said.

“Every last member of my family is Irish,” she said. “My name is Maeve O’Byrne. Now let’s look at your picture. What did you say the girl’s name is?”

“I didn’t say. I don’t know.”

Maeve O’Byrne pulled out a pair of reading glasses. As she looked at the photo, I held my breath. It didn’t help. She shook her head and handed the photo back. “I don’t recall her,” she said.

“Don’t you have files?”

When she answered, there was a hint of asperity in the lilt. “Yes, we have files, Mrs. Kilbourn. And like most organizations, we classify them by name. Since you don’t know the girl’s name, we have nothing to go on. At any rate, you say this was over five years ago. If there was a file, it would have been destroyed. We cull inactive files after five years.”

“So I’m out of luck.”

“I’m sorry.”

The phone rang and Michelle answered it. “Just a minute.
I’ll see,” she said. She put her hand over the mouthpiece and looked up at Maeve. “That’s the paper,” she said. “They’re asking if we want to keep our ad in the personals. Tess used to check every day to make sure it was there and there weren’t any typos.”

Maeve sighed wearily. “Sure, tell them to keep it in. What does it say, anyway?”

Michelle asked the person on the other end of the phone, and she repeated the words for Maeve: “ ‘If you’re pregnant and alone, we’re here. Beating Heart can help.’ Then there’s our number.”

“That sounds acceptable,” Maeve said. She turned back to me. “I wish Tess were here. She’s good at taking care of matters like that.”

“I wish she were here, too,” I said. I wrote my home and office numbers on a card. “Please, if you hear from Tess, let me know.”

“I will,” Maeve said.

She was as good as her word. The next Wednesday when I came in from my senior class, the phone in my office was ringing. It was Maeve O’Byrne. “Good news,” she said. “Tess called.”

“Where is she?” I asked.

“She didn’t say.”

“When will she be back?”

“She didn’t say that either.” I could hear the impatience in Maeve O’Byrne’s voice. “The point is,” she said, “Tess is all right, and I’m glad she called because I was about to phone the police.”

“Maybe that’s why she called,” I said.

“What?”

“Nothing. Thanks, Maeve. I mean that. I know how busy you are.”

“If I hear anything more, I’ll be in touch,” she said.

“I’d appreciate that,” I said, and I hung up, more discouraged than ever. Every lead seemed to be turning into a dead end.

I spent the rest of the week teaching classes, trying to bring about a
détente
in the war between our pets, and reading up on incidences in which nations had censured trading partners for human-rights violations. Human rights had turned out to be a popular subject. The switchboards had been jammed on the call-in segment of our show, and we were revisiting the topic on Saturday night.

By the time I drove Taylor to her art class on Saturday I felt as if I was handling life again. I’d marked half a section of essays on the neo-conservatism of the eighties. I’d talked to a colleague who’d just come back from Mexico with documents that made me wonder again about the ethics of two electoral democracies entering into a trade agreement with a quasi-dictatorship. Most importantly, it seemed my peacemaking efforts with the animals were paying off. The dogs no longer snarled when the kitten came into the room, and he no longer arched his small back and hissed every time he saw them. Taylor still hadn’t given her cat a name, but it seemed he was here to stay.

When I walked into the gallery gift shop and found two inspired Christmas presents within five minutes, I knew I was on a streak. There was a lineup at the cash register, so I left the bronze cat I’d chosen for Taylor and the box of stained-glass tree ornaments I’d picked out for Greg and Mieka on the counter and went back to browsing.

There were several copies of
The Boy in the Lens’s Eye
, but there was only one copy of
Prairiegirl
. I picked it up and began leafing through it. I was not an expert on photography, but even I knew the pictures were brilliant. Seductive, by turns naive and knowing, the prepubescent girls posed for the camera. The photographs were stunning, but they were also disquieting.

The oldest of the children in the photographs was no more than thirteen. Exulting in the changes in their young bodies, they had shown themselves to the camera. They were innocent, but what about the person behind the camera? I thought of Sylvie’s cool, unwavering gaze and her blazing talent, and I knew that, for better or worse, I would never see the world as she did.

The picture of the girl lying on the dock was almost the last one in the book, and it stopped my heart. The girl had been swimming; her thin cotton panties were soaked and her hair curled wetly against her shoulders. The wood of the dock beneath her was dark and rough textured; set against it, the soft perfection of her body seemed incandescent. Technically, that contrast must have been what gave the picture its power, but I didn’t care about technique. All I cared about was the girl. The ecstasy she felt that day on the dock was frozen in time, but the girl herself had grown up. She had become a mother, and she had her picture taken again. This time she was sitting on a mall Santa’s knee and holding her baby. I pulled the photograph I’d found in Ian’s pocket from my purse and held it against the photograph in
Prairiegirl
. Unmistakably, the face was the same.

I was shaking so badly I could barely turn the page, but I had to know if she was there again.

She was. In the last photo in the book, two young girls stood against a split-rail fence. Their arms were around each other’s waists and their faces were turned toward one another. The picture was called “Friends.” One of the friends was the girl from Ian’s picture; the other was Maureen Gault.

When I put the copy of
Prairiegirl
on the counter of the gallery shop, I felt dazed. The woman behind the cash register gave me poinsettia-patterned gift boxes for the bronze cat and the Christmas ornaments. After she’d rung through the book, she looked up brightly. “Shall I gift-wrap this?”

“It’s mine,” I said.

“The best presents are always those we give ourselves, aren’t they?” she said, and she turned to the next customer.

As I waited in the lobby for Taylor, I read the introduction Sylvie had written for
Prairiegirl
. It was full of art talk about purpose and explanations of how she had used an eight-by-ten-inch view camera for the photographs. There was nothing there for me. I turned the page. In the acknowledgements, Sylvie thanked “the girls of Chaplin, Saskatchewan, whose luminous beauty was a gift to the camera.” She did not thank the parents who had trusted her to preserve their daughters’ innocence in their photographs.

My mind felt clearer than it had since the moment I found the photograph in Ian’s jacket. The girl in the Santa photograph was from Chaplin. I sat in the lobby of the gallery
assessing possibilities. My first thought was to call Sylvie. I rejected that. If Ian had been involved with this young woman, his infidelity was my private grief. Sylvie was out.

The girls were all from Chaplin. There was no doubt in my mind now that Chaplin was the key. The desolate moonscape behind the sodium sulphate plant flashed through my mind. Chaplin was a company town and a small one. Carolyn Atcheson, the teacher Hilda had visited, had known Maureen Gault. Surely, she would know at least something about her best friend. The next day was Sunday, a good day to take a long drive to visit a stranger.

By the time Taylor came from her class, full of talk about Fil and his teachings, the adrenalin was pumping. That night on
Canada This Week
I argued passionately for the need to demand stringent human-rights protections from our trading partners. When the program ended, Jill came over and paid me her highest compliment. “That worked,” she said, and she offered to buy me a cup of Nationtv cafeteria coffee. Afterwards, I drove home and looked through
Prairiegirl
again. The next morning, after church, I set out for Chaplin.

It was an ugly day. The sky was heavy with snow, and the countryside looked as if it had been sculpted out of iron: iron-grey clouds and iron-grey land joined by a steel-grey sky. The only colour between Regina and Parkbeg came from the Christmas lights on Chubby’s Café near Belle Plaine.

I was grateful when I left the flatness of the farmlands and hit the gentle hills of ranch country. The hills seemed to offer protection against the heaviness of the looming sky. I’d always loved this short-grass land. Ian and some of the other members of the Legislature had come here to hunt each fall. They were seldom gone for longer than three days, but three days had been enough to transform them from their everyday selves into strangers whose faces were dark with beards
and who smelled of wet wool and stale liquor and something unidentifiable and primal. Boys’ Night Out.

It had been six, maybe seven years since I’d been here. I hadn’t driven this far west on the Trans-Canada since Ian died, and as I neared the spot on the highway where he’d been killed, I was tense.

Incredibly, I drove right by it. As the desolate mountain of sodium sulphate behind the Chaplin plant loomed up out of nowhere, I realized that somehow I’d missed the cut-off to the Vermilion Hills where my husband died. I hadn’t even recognized it. As I turned off the highway into the town of Chaplin, I thought of a reservation Ian and I had driven through in Montana where each fatal accident along the road was marked by a wooden cross that had been decorated by the grieving families. At the time, we’d thought the plastic flowers and baby booties and beadwork necklaces which decorated the crosses were mawkish. Now I wasn’t so sure. It would have been good if there had been something to mark the place where my husband died.

I pulled into the Petro-Can, bought a cup of coffee, and asked the mechanic for directions to Carolyn Atcheson’s house. It was two blocks away. On my way into town I’d noticed the school. It was very modern: terra cotta with cobalt-blue eaves and trim. The mechanic pointed towards it.

“She lives on First Street, so she can keep an eye on that school of hers. She’s got a right; it wouldn’t have been built without her. She taught the whole school board.”

Carolyn Atcheson’s house was small, neat, and carefully kept. Her walk was shovelled, her rosebushes were wrapped in sacking for the winter, and the brown paint on her gingerbread trim and front door was fresh. The name
C. ATCHESON
was burned into a wooden sign nailed above her mailbox. When I saw the light inside the living room, I was relieved. It had been quixotic to drive from Regina to
Chaplin without calling ahead. I knocked on the front door, and a dog somewhere in the house began to bark, but no one came out to see why. There was a large front window. I made my way between the rosebushes and stood on tiptoe to peer in. The dog, an ancient terrier, flattened his face against the window barking at me. Everything inside was shining, but no one was there.

A snowflake fell, and then another. A gust of wind came out of nowhere, rattling Carolyn Atcheson’s wooden shutters. I thought of driving home through a snowstorm and shuddered. It had all been for nothing; I hadn’t learned a thing. I turned to walk back to the car. “Shit,” I said. “Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit.”

Head bent against the wind, I didn’t notice the man come out from the house next door. But he noticed me.

“That’s no language for a lady,” he said.

“Sorry,” I said, and I kept walking.