Tell Anna She's Safe (22 page)

I punched in the codes to listen to the messages. The first was from a
CBC
reporter. The next was a reporter from the
Sun
. The one after that was from the
Citizen
. And the last was from Steve Quinn. None of them gave a reason for phoning. None of them needed to.

I couldn't get hold of Quinn. Or Lundy or Roach. I turned on the radio.

It was the second story on the local newscast. “A skull and some bones were found yesterday in an isolated woodlot in the Gatineau Hills. The remains have been sent to Montreal for identification. A forty-one-year-old white male has been arrested. Charges are pending.”

A woodlot. Earth. Bones. I was stunned. The images had all been wrong. Dead wrong. But Lucy had been found. At last.

Before the news was over, the phone began to ring. The first caller was Mary Frances. “Oh, Ellen, I'm so sorry.”

“Sorry?” I repeated her word, stupidly.

“My dear, sorry that it was the worst possible news.”

That shook me. I was supposed to have been hoping she was still alive, not assuming my dreams had been correct. I was supposed to be grieving her death, not feeling this overriding relief that her body had finally been found.

The phone kept ringing. I stayed in my office so I could monitor the call display. I let the media calls ring through to the machine. I took the calls from friends. Angel told me to stay home for as long as I needed. I didn't know how long I needed. I didn't know what I needed.

The noon newscast had more details. “An Ottawa man has been arrested for the murder of Lucy Stockman. Ms. Stockman had been missing since April twenty-second. Remains believed to belong to the victim were found in a secluded area of woods in the Masham area by her common-law husband. He was accompanied by a woman believed to be an undercover police officer. Following the discovery, Tim Brennan, forty-one, walked into the police station and was immediately arrested. An hour ago, Mr. Brennan was formally charged with first-degree murder.”

Accompanied by a woman.
Why hadn't I done a useful thing like that?

All those dreams, so-called visions. It had all been bullshit. The cops had been right. Of course. They were trained to come up with plausible theories and solve crimes. Quinn had said they knew Tim needed to produce the body. They had assumed he knew where the body was. They had worked on that assumption. They had arranged for someone to go undercover. To befriend Tim. To keep up the “search” with him. It had paid off. It all made perfect sense.

What a fool I'd been. Searching south of the city. Searching in abandoned buildings. Searching in the water. She hadn't been in the water at all. She'd been nowhere near water. She'd been in dense woods, buried in a shallow grave.

As dry as her bones were now.

PART II: FINDING

Being one with the Tao when you seek, you find.

—Tao Te Ching

15.

T
HERE WAS ONE NAME AND
number on my call display I was not expecting to see ever again. Lucy's remains had been positively identified in Montreal two days before. The day before that, Tim Brennan had been charged with her murder and put behind bars without bail. There was no one who should be calling me from Lucy's house.

I made myself pick up the receiver.

Lucy's voice asked for me.

“Speaking,” I whispered.

“Ellen. Hello. It's Anna Stockman.”

I sat down hard on my office chair and let out an audible breath. “Anna—I'm sorry. I never phoned. To say—”

“That's okay. I'm calling to let you know there's going to be a memorial service for Lucy on the thirteenth.” There was a briskness in her tone. Briskness would carry her through. “I'm calling you from Lucy's. Doug and I drove up from Toronto last night. We brought my father. We've been trying to plan a service. We want to find someone who will speak. But I don't know any of Lucy's friends. You're the only one I've met. I was wondering if we could ask for your help.”

“Of course.” My response was automatic. Then I added, “I didn't know Lucy very well. I don't think I could—”

“I know. But we were wondering if you would mind calling some of her other friends for us. Maybe find two or three people who would be able to speak.”

“Of course,” I said again.

The first surprise was the sheer volume of names and numbers Anna dictated to me. The second—when I started my phone calls—was the discovery that none of Lucy's other friends knew each other either. I was not the only one outside the circle. There was no circle. If we were a circle, we were each spokes. Spokes without a wheel joining them together. Spokes whose centre was Lucy. That was my third surprise—that Lucy had been such a hub. She had reached far and wide: artists, massage therapists, lawyers, government clients who'd become personal friends, teenage children of friends, the range was endless. And they all had stories.

But none was willing to speak. They were nervous. Or shy. Or, like Kevin, afraid they'd cry.

Lucy's friends could not tell their stories in public, but they needed to share them with someone. Someone who would listen. Someone who would glean. Someone who would pull it all together and deliver it back to them. I could listen and glean. That was “research.” The second part—the pulling it all together, the delivering it back—that part I wasn't as qualified for. But I couldn't bear the disappointment in Anna's voice when I called her back the next day.

“I'll speak, if you like.” I had already decided to offer. “I was thinking I could gather stories from her friends and present them as a collective memory. If you think it's a good idea.”

Anna thought it was a wonderful idea. I wasn't so sure. But somewhere behind it, I felt Lucy scheming.

I spent two evenings on the phone. I explained what I was doing. I felt gratitude—and need—emanating from the other end of the line. The stories spilled out. They matched Kevin's stories of the dynamo she had been. They described her passion for fairness, her enthusiasm for learning, for throwing herself into everything she did, for teaching others. The stories were imbued with warmth, gratitude, admiration. They were coloured, now, with confusion, pain, guilt.

Only one person refused to speak to me.

“I do appreciate what you're doing,” said Curtis. “But it's not something I can participate in.” The wariness I had been expecting from our previous conversation. The warmth took me by surprise. “The grieving masses,” he added, “do not want to hear what I have to say about Lucy.” No, they probably didn't. Here was the bitter ex-lover. Who else had I been expecting?

“I'm sorry I bothered you,” I said. “I understand.”

“No. You don't. You just think you do.” His directness also took me aback. It seemed bold, in a conversation between strangers. “You and everyone else already have a construct of what Lucy did, and why, and where I fit in, and how I feel,” he continued. “Lucy, by the way, was the queen of constructs. That's why I don't want to talk to you. Because no one wants to hear the truth, especially my version of it. I've already been labelled the jilted lover.”

“No,” I said. Then I corrected myself. “Yes.”

There was a pause. Then: “Thank you.”

“For what?” This conversation was getting more and more bizarre.

“For not denying what you're thinking.”

His next words were the most unbelievable of the entire conversation. “What time,” he asked, “does the memorial service start?”

There was no ventilation in the church. The hundreds of bodies in the pews added their own heat to the already close air. Our entrance had been documented by a row of television cameras out on the sidewalk. Journalists had been requested to stay outside. Those who had come in were requested not to take notes. The only movement in the church was the fanning of leaflets, like so many small white flags.

I sat close to the front. The two pages of my speech were getting damp between my fingers. Somewhere behind me, Marc sat sweltering in a winter-weight suit, his only one. He had arrived home just the night before—only a day after I had moved out. Had called me in the morning to offer to go with me. “Marc, you don't have to. I'm sure you need to recover from all that driving.”

“I'm coming,” he said. “I'll pick you up at noon.” His words, and his decisiveness, brought me surprising relief. And, after we hung up, tears. I sat among all my unpacked boxes and cried out my frustration. What was I doing here? Was I doing the right thing?

By the time Marc arrived at the door, I had pulled myself together. I
was
doing the right thing. I needed time to sort everything out. Not just Marc and me, and Steve Quinn and me, but, most of all, Lucy's death and the last ten traumatic weeks. I needed my own place to do that from.

Just as the service was starting, a man with red eyes and a fist of tissues slipped into the pew beside me. We exchanged a sympathetic glance.

The minister was a woman. She had never met Lucy, even though geography would have put Lucy in her parish. Lucy had not been a churchgoer. Even the United Church would have been appalled at most of Lucy's beliefs. The minister was appalled at her death. The minister seemed to be appalled at the death of all women, no matter how they met their end.

“Five thousand women this year will die of breast cancer,” she shouted to the congregation. There was a pause for emphasis. “
Five
thousand.” Another pause. Then she volleyed another statistic into the church: “One in two women will be a victim of violence.”

She paused to reload her ammunition. “Look around you. Which woman would you choose?”

Her words angered me. It was not the anger she intended. Lucy had not died of breast cancer. And this was not a political rally. The men in the congregation had not come to be accused. They had come with the rest of us to mourn the death of Lucy Stockman.

The man beside me was openly weeping. I reached over and took his hand. He didn't withdraw it. I let go only when it was my turn to make my way to the front to deliver my distilled memory of Lucy.

I unfolded the pages, took a breath and spoke in as clear a voice as I could manage. “The story goes that when Lucy was a little girl she danced so much she wore out the living room carpet. Lucy lived her whole life with that exuberance—and with that
thoroughness
—that made her wear down the carpet….”

Halfway through my rehearsed speech I relaxed enough to look down into the congregation. In the first row, Anna and Doug, and an older man who was obviously Lucy's father, sat linked by their hands and the identical expressions of grief on their faces. Beside them were Sergeants Lundy and Roach. Their hands were in their laps, their faces composed. That they were here touched me. I had not expected them.

My eyes swept over them and beyond, into the throng of anonymous faces that packed the church.

“She got right into the fight to get Tim Brennan out of prison,” I recited. “And we have to give her credit for her incredible energy and courage and faith, no matter what we might think of her wisdom.”

At my mention of Tim Brennan's name, I could almost feel the reporters in the congregation memorizing my words. There was no question I would be quoted in tomorrow's papers.

It wasn't until I was heading back down the steps to my pew that I spotted Quinn. He was sitting directly behind Lundy and Roach. My heart, which had just stopped pounding from nerves, began pounding again. I hadn't expected to see him here either. Our eyes met briefly—he gave me a half-smile of encouragement—and then I turned to re-enter my pew across the aisle. Would he stay for the reception? Would he and Marc meet? I barely heard the next speaker.

And then Lucy herself breezed up to the front of the church.

I didn't hear the name she gave. She had been, she said, a university friend. She might have been Lucy's twin. A slightly bigger build, and heavy-rimmed glasses, but the same dark hair and complexion, the same energy. She wasn't, that I knew of, on the official list of speakers. She had, she said, just got into town. That would explain it. She hadn't seen Lucy in years, but in university they had been inseparable.

She wore a flowing dress of Indian cotton and as she paced up and down at the front of the church it swirled around her, as if imbued with an energy of its own. She regaled us with stories—mischief they'd created, trips they'd taken. She made us laugh, the only laughter the church heard during that service. And then just as quickly she breezed out. I didn't see her again. I wasn't even sure she'd been real. It seemed just as plausible that the ghost of the mischievous Lucy we'd just heard described had briefly appeared among us to remind us that life prevailed. But it also seemed a mockery. One so alive, the other so dead.

By a miracle Marc found me in the mass making its way, as one body, to the back of the church and down the stairs to the reception room. Then we got separated.

Someone touched my shoulder. I turned to face the man with the red-rimmed eyes. He took my hand. “Thank you for speaking so honestly about Lucy. You were the only one who had the courage to mention Brennan.”

“You're Curtis.” His words and responses were still throwing me.

“Are you doing anything after this?” My hand was still in his. His eyes were holding mine. He was my height, with a lean build and shaggy hair. He kept pushing his bangs back from his eyes. His mouth turned up naturally at the corners. “Would you go for a beer with me? I have a feeling we have a lot to talk about.” His smile went deep into his sad eyes.

“But I thought you didn't want….”

“I didn't want to talk to a stranger over the phone and have my words twisted in a speech. But,” he smiled again, “you didn't do any twisting.”

“I'm glad you think so.” I glanced around and located Marc … talking to Quinn. Shit! Of all the hundreds of people in the room they'd had to find each other.

Curtis's eyes had followed mine. He had probably seen my alarm too. He smiled his understanding. “Some other time then.” The smile came from his eyes. Beyond the redness and the obvious pain, there was kindness. This wasn't the distant, aloof man I had envisioned.

I wanted to cry then, and it wasn't just about Lucy. “Yes,” I said. “I'd like that.”

“I have your number,” he said. “I'll call you.”

I disengaged my hand but there was someone else with her hand outstretched to take it, a woman who emanated serenity through her grief. A woman with short brown hair and delicate features. “I'm Trish.”

Trish Cousins. Lucy's massage therapist and counsellor—and Marnie's partner.

“I couldn't help hearing what Curtis said. I want to thank you for speaking so honestly too. What you said about Lucy taking risks for Tim. It's true. She did think life wasn't worth living if you didn't take risks. And in Tim's case she considered them calculated risks—as you said.”

“And what did
you
think?” I hadn't been able to get hold of her when I was making my calls.

Trish's smile was as gentle as her voice. “I'm paid to listen, not to judge.”

“But still—you heard maybe more than anyone else about her relationship, about what was really going on.”

Trish was nodding. Over her shoulder, I saw Marc and Quinn shake hands and Marc move away.

“I know this isn't the time to talk about it,” I added. “But I've heard so many theories and opinions in the last few days as I've been talking to everyone. Would it be okay to call you?”

“Yes. I think I probably need to talk about it too. You have my number still?”

“Yes.”

We smiled at each other. It wasn't until she had disappeared in the crowd that I thought to wonder if Marnie were here. I turned to scope the room again. Quinn was standing where Marc had left him. But before I could reach him, I came to Lundy and Roach holding small plastic cups of juice.