The Wandering Soul Murders (2 page)

“Okay,” she said, “I’ll come over and help you unpack. That’ll guilt you.”

“Right now?” I asked.

“Sure. I’m just poring over our anemic budget trying to find some money that didn’t get spent. Depressing work for the first five-star day we’ve had this month.”

“Come over then. It’d be great to see you. But listen, I was calling for another reason, too. Have you heard anything about a case called the Little Flower murders?”

Jill whistled, “I’ve heard a lot. One of our investigative units is putting together a feature on it. I can bring over some of their tapes if you like.” She was quiet for a beat. “What’s your interest in this, Jo?”

“I’ll tell you when you get here. Listen, I bought a new house. Same neighbourhood as I lived in before I moved to Saskatoon, but over on Regina Avenue.” I gave her the address. “Twenty minutes?”

“Fifteen,” she said. “I’ve been cooped up here long enough. I’m starting to wilt.”

When I saw her coming up the front walk, she didn’t look like a woman who was wilting. She looked sensational, and I was conscious of the fact that I hadn’t changed since I’d grabbed my blue jeans and an old Mets T-shirt out of the clean laundry when Mieka had called that morning. Jill’s red hair was cut in a short bob, and she was wearing an orangey-gold T-shirt, an oversize unbleached cotton jacket, short in the front and long in the back, and matching pants. On the lapel of her jacket she had pinned a brilliant silk sunflower.

“You look like a van Gogh picnic,” I said, hugging her. “Where did you get that outfit?”

“Value Village,” she said. “It’s all second-hand.”

“How come when I wear Value Village it looks like Value Village?”

“Because you’re too conservative, Jo. You’ve got to force yourself to walk by the polyester pantsuits.” She stepped past me into the front hall and looked around. “My God, this isn’t a polyester pantsuit kind of house. You must be doing all right.”

“Well, I am doing all right,” I said, “but not this all right. Come on, let me give you the grand tour, and I’ll tell you about it.”

Even after two weeks, I felt a thrill when I walked around our new home. It was a beautiful house, thirty years old, solid, with big sunny rooms and lots of Laura Ashley wallpaper and oak floors and gleaming woodwork. I loved being a tour guide and Jill was a wonderful companion: enthusiastic, flattering and funny. When we walked out in the backyard and she saw the pool glittering in the sun, she said, “This really is sublime.” Then our dogs came out of the house and ran down the hill. Sadie, the collie, stopped dead at the edge of the pool, but Rose, the golden retriever, jumped in and began doing laps.

“Not so sublime,” I said.

Jill grimaced. “Does that happen often?”

“She’s getting used to it,” I said. “We’re down to about fourteen times a day.”

“This is why I have cats,” Jill said.

“Lou and Murray are still alive?” I said, surprised.

“They’re planning their joint birthday celebration even as we speak,” Jill said. “They’ll be thirteen July 29.”

“Come on,” I said, “let’s go in and get a beer and you can tell me all about it. Are cat years the same as dog years? Are Lou and Murray really going to be ninety, or just thirteen?”

“You’re mocking us,” Jill said, “so I’m not going to tell you. Let’s hear your family’s news.”

We went into the kitchen. Jill found a couple of beer glasses while I opened the beer.

“You did hear, didn’t you,” I said, “that I’ve adopted a little girl? Her name is Taylor, and she’s five. She was my friend Sally Love’s daughter.”

Jill’s eyes looked sad. “I heard about Sally, of course. That was such a tragedy.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I don’t think any of us are over it yet. Anyway, there was no one to take Taylor, so I did. It seems to be working out. The kids are really good with her, and I think Taylor’s beginning to feel that we’re her family.”

“She’s lucky to have you,” Jill said. “Not every kid gets Gaia, the Earth Mother.”

“Well, thanks,” I said, “I think.”

We brought out two bottles of Great West and sat at the picnic table and watched Rose do her patient laps. It was a perfect day, still and sunny and warm. Jill turned to me. “This is what my mother and her friends used to do when I was growing up,” she said. “Twenty-fourth of May weekend they’d hit the backyards and start working on their tans. My mother used to call it her summer project.”

“Do you want to go back to that?” I asked.

“Lord, no,” she said. “Now tell me about the house.”

“Actually it was Sally’s lawyer’s idea. When I was making the arrangements to adopt Taylor, he asked me if I was going to have to renovate my old house for an extra child. In fact, I’d planned to. Nothing very elaborate, but Taylor’s inherited her mother’s talent for making art.”

“Not a bad inheritance,” Jill said.

“Not bad at all. It’s amazing to see. You read about gifted children, but to actually live with a little kid who has this incredible talent is something else again. Anyway, I told Sally’s lawyer I wanted to add on a room where Taylor could paint. He just about patted me on the head. ‘Good, good,’ he said, ‘we mustn’t ignore the fact that in cases like these the concept of life expectations comes into play.’ ”

Jill shook her head. “Ugh, lawyer talk. What are life expectations?”

“According to this guy it’s a term the law uses to describe what Taylor could have expected her life to be like given her parents’ earning power and position in the community. Sally and Stuart Lachlan were both wealthy people – so the lawyer said Taylor could have reasonably expected to grow up with pretty much everything she wanted.”

“I don’t like the sound of that,” Jill said thoughtfully.

“Neither did I,” I said, “but in this particular case it simply meant investing a little money from Taylor’s trust fund in the place she was going to live. At first I was going to put it toward the new addition, but then this house came on the market. I’d gotten a pretty good advance for that biography I wrote about Andy Boychuk, and you know what a slump real estate’s in here. With what I got for our old house and the advance, this place really didn’t cost much more than the renovations would have.”

“And this is so spiffy,” Jill said.

“Right,” I said, “and this is so spiffy. Can I get you another beer?”

“No, I’ve got a meeting at four o’clock with the vice-president of finance. He’s coming out from head office, and I need to smell hard-working and underfunded.” She looked at her watch. “If we’re going to look at the Little Flower tape, we’d better do it now. You never did tell me why you’re interested.”

I tried to keep the emotion out of my voice. “This morning Mieka found a body in the garbage can outside the place she’s going to have her catering business. It was a woman who had done some cleaning for her – actually it was a girl, seventeen. I overheard one of the cops say it looked like another Little Flower murder.”

Jill’s body was tense with interest. “Was the face mutilated?”

“I couldn’t see her face,” I said. “But whoever killed her had pulled her slacks and panties down around her ankles.”

“Bastard.” Jill spit the word into the fine May afternoon.

Her face was ashen as we walked into the house. Neither of us said a word as Jill put the tape in the
VCR
and the first pictures filled the screen. They were sickening. Reflexively, I closed my eyes. When I opened them, the images on the screen were even worse. The camera had pulled in for a tight shot of the inside of a commercial garbage bin. There were two girls lying on some garbage in the bin. They looked as if they had been folded in two and dropped in. Both girls were naked from the waist down, and each of them had long hair that fell in a dark pillow behind her head. They would have looked like children hiding if it weren’t for their unnatural stillness and for the hideous distortion violence had made of their faces. The features were unrecognizable; eyes, nose and lips had run together into a charred, melted mass.

Beside me, Jill said quietly, “Their names were Debbie and Donna Lavallee. They were twins.”

The camera panned the grey sky and dirty snow of a city alley in late winter. Then it focused on the next victim. Her pants had been removed, too. She was splayed over the rim of an oil can so that the edge hit her vaginal area.

“Michele Macdonald,” Jill said. “Be grateful you can’t see her face.”

The dirty snow and grey skies were gone in the next pictures. It was spring, and the sky was bright as the camera zoomed in on the industrial garbage can. This girl’s body was leaning into the can the way Bernice Morin’s had been. When the camera positioned itself over her shoulder and focused down, I could see that she’d worn her blonde hair in a ponytail.

“Two years ago she was a cheerleader at Holy Name,” Jill said. “Her name was Cindy Duchek.”

I sat there stunned. I felt as if I had been kicked in the stomach. Finally, I said, “Where did the name Little Flower murders come from?”

“The bodies of the girls in that first picture, the Lavallee twins, were found behind Little Flower Church.”

“Kind of a variation on the baby left on the cathedral doorstep,” I said.

Jill looked at me hard. “Are you all right?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s the worst thing I’ve ever seen. How old were they?”

“They were all fifteen.”

I thought of Mieka at fifteen. The biggest problems in her life had been the shape of her nose and her algebra marks. “How does it happen?” I said. “How does a young girl get to the point where life on the street is an option?”

Jill looked weary. “You know, Jo, the street isn’t a last resort for these kids. For a lot of them, it’s a step up. When they meet that guy with the Camaro and he tells them he loves them and promises to take care of them, it must sound like they’ve died and gone to heaven.”

“And the next step is …”

“And the next step is three-inch heels, fuck-me pants and their own little corner on Broad Street.” Jill’s voice was bitter. “And it just keeps getting better. I’m sorry, Jo. This Little Flower thing really gets to me. No one seems to care about those girls. I don’t mean the cops aren’t investigating. They are. But there hasn’t exactly been a public outcry to find the killers.”

“Because the girls are prostitutes?” I asked.

“Because people think they’re garbage,” Jill said. “And nice people are always relieved when someone else takes out the garbage. What was that term your lawyer friend came up with? Life expectations? Well, the life expectations for these girls are zero. Zip. Nothing. And once their lives kick into high gear, the odds start going down.”

She stood up, and the contrast between the bright sunflower on her jacket and the despair in her eyes was pretty hard to take.

We were silent as we walked through the house. At the front door Jill turned to me. “I’m glad you’re back in town, Jo. Hey, tell Mieka congratulations for me, would you? I saw her engagement announcement in the paper. I hope what happened this morning doesn’t cast too long a shadow on all the happy times ahead.”

“I hope you get your wish,” I said.

But she didn’t.

CHAPTER

2

Mieka was too quiet during dinner. After we’d put the dishes in the dishwasher, she started down the hall to her room. I didn’t want her to be alone, and I went after her.

“Why don’t we go out on the deck and watch the kids for a while?” I said. “Your brother and Camilo are showing Taylor how to take care of baseball equipment. We’ve already missed how to sand a bat.”

Mieka shook her head. “Taylor will be the hottest rookie in Little League,” she said, as she followed me out the back door. Angus and his friend Camilo were kneeling on the deck oiling their gloves. Taylor was between them, watching intently.

I touched Angus on the shoulder. “Maybe if you didn’t use quite so much Vaseline, you’d get over your fielding problems,” I said. He looked up at me, pained, and Taylor moved a little closer to him. It seemed like a good sign that she was already on his side, and I wasn’t surprised when she decided to go to 7-Eleven with the boys instead of staying home with Mieka and me.

After they left, I turned to Mieka. “Feel like taking the dogs for a walk?” I asked.

“Your solution for everything,” she said. “A shower or a walk. And I’m already clean. Sure, let’s go.”

It was a beautiful evening, and we followed the bicycle path all the way out to Mieka’s old high school on Royal Road. As we walked around the grounds, we could hear the lazy whoosh of the sprinklers watering the new geraniums and the sounds of kids playing Frisbee.

Bernice Morin’s death and the tapes of the Little Flower victims were fresh wounds, but the problem that dogged me as we walked around the old high school was five months old.

That morning when Mieka had called and asked me to come down to the shop was the first time she had turned to me since January. The rupture had begun when she dropped out of school in Saskatoon and used the fund her father and I had set up for university to buy a catering business called Judgements. Despite my predictions, Judgements had caught on like wildfire, and when the chance came to open a sister business in Regina, Mieka hadn’t missed a beat. She drew up estimates on how much it would cost to lease and renovate space in Old City Hall, then she went to her fiancé’s mother, Lorraine Harris, and borrowed the money. It wasn’t until the papers were signed that she told me what she’d done. I’d been furious: furious at Mieka for getting in over her head and furious at Lorraine Harris for letting her get in over her head. And something else: I was jealous, jealous that Mieka had gone to Greg’s mother rather than coming to me.

We loved each other too much to risk a no-holds-barred confrontation, but there had been some troubled weeks. Then, when we came back to Regina, I’d asked Mieka to move home. It seemed like a good idea all around. With two new businesses and a September wedding, Mieka’s life was pressing in on her. I thought being with me and the kids and having the details of day-to-day living taken care of would help her deal with the demands of the summer. For me, of course, it meant a chance to get our relationship back to the old closeness. The perfect solution to everybody’s problems. But, like a lot of perfect solutions, this one hadn’t worked.

Mieka had changed. She was a woman and, in many respects, a stranger. In my more honest moments, I knew it was wrong to want her to be the sweet, pliable girl she had been at eighteen. Twenty times a day, I repeated C.P. Snow’s line that the love between a parent and a child is the only love that must grow toward separation. Every morning I woke up determined to be open and reasonable, and every night I went to bed knowing I had been neither. My only justification was that I believed I was right. In my heart, I felt my daughter had chosen the wrong path.

That night, as I looked at Mieka’s profile, so familiar and so dear, somehow being right didn’t seem important any more.

As if she had read my mind, Mieka turned. “Was John Lennon the one who said, ‘There’s nothing like death to put life in perspective’?”

I smiled at her. “I don’t know, but whoever said it, it’s a good thought.”

Her eyes filled with tears. “I’m sorry things have been bad between us, Mummy.”

That was when I started to cry. “Oh, Miek, I’m sorry, too. All I ever wanted was what was best for you.”

Mieka reached in her pocket, pulled out a Kleenex and handed it to me. “Peace offering,” she said. Then she smiled. “Do you remember that time Peter decided to take up wrestling?”

“Some of my darkest hours as a mother.”

“But you let him. I remember you went to all his matches.”

“Including the one where your brother got knocked unconscious. I’m still proud of the fact that I didn’t jump in the ring that night and cradle him in my arms.”

Mieka took my hand. “That must have been hard for you. You’re not exactly deficient in the motherly instincts department, you know.”

I turned to look at her. “I take it you’d like me to work on suppressing those instincts for a while.”

“Yeah, Mum, I would.” Her voice was strong and determined. “I want my chance. I know I may get flattened, but I have to try.”

I gave her hand a squeeze. “One good thing about me,” I said, “I always know when I’m licked.”

Mieka smiled. “Don’t think of it as being licked. Think of it as accepting the inevitable gracefully.”

“Same thing, eh?” I said.

Her smile grew broader. “Oh, yeah,” she said, “it’s the same thing, but this way you get to look like a good guy.”

We walked home arm in arm, like chums in a 1940s movie, and as we settled into our old pattern of comfortable, aimless talk, I was filled with gratitude.

When Mieka hesitated at the back gate of our yard, my first thought was that she wanted to tell me she was grateful, too. But as I watched her square her shoulders and take a deep breath, I knew that whatever was coming was not happy talk. When there was bad news, Mieka never wasted time in preamble.

“Christy Sinclair came into Judgements yesterday,” she said. “I wasn’t going to mention it because I knew it would upset you, but considering everything else that’s happened …” She shrugged her shoulders.

“What did she want?” I asked.

“She wanted to know where Peter was.”

“Did you tell her?”

“Yes, I did,” Mieka said. “She made it sound so urgent, and there were other people there. Bernice, and Greg’s mother, and poor Blaine was waiting outside in the car. It just seemed easier to tell her.”

“Damn,” I said, “I’d hoped Christy was out of your brother’s life – out of all our lives.”

“Maybe she is,” Mieka said wearily. “Christy has always been unpredictable.”

“I wish that’s all she was,” I said. “Her problem’s more serious than that. I think it’s a pathology, and it scares me.”

Mieka was silent. Suddenly the magic had gone from the evening. The light faded, the wind came up, and someone on a bicycle yelled at the dogs. If you believed in omens, the signs accompanying Christy Sinclair’s re-entry into our lives didn’t bode well.

When Peter had begun dating her before Christmas, we had all been ecstatic. He was nineteen years old and painfully shy. There had never been a girlfriend. Christy was exuberant and outgoing – just the ticket, it seemed. She was his biology lab instructor, and when it turned out that she was not twenty-one, as she had told Pete at first, but twenty-five, I took a deep breath and tried not to let it worry me. But as the winter wore on, other things started to.

Christy’s lie about her age had not been an aberration. She lied about everything: where she’d eaten lunch; the names of the people with whom she had spent the weekend; the way her superiors in the biology department assessed her work performance. That winter I had been teaching political science at the university where Christy was working. She must have known the lies she told about her daily life would come to light, but it didn’t seem to alarm her. In an odd way, it seemed to make her more reckless. As the winter wore on, her lies became more transparent, more vulnerable to disclosure. It was a frightening thing to witness.

There was another thing. I had been touched at first by how much Christy liked us, but it began to appear that her need to be part of our family was obsessive. She wanted to be at our house all the time, and when she was there, she wanted to be with me. She was an educated and capable woman, but she followed me around with the dogged determination of a tired child. I tried to understand, to sympathize with whatever privation had brought about this immense need, but the truth was Christy Sinclair got under my skin. When I was with her, I itched to get away; when I got away, I felt guilty because I knew how much being with me mattered to her.

As the winter wore on, it became clear that I wasn’t the only one Christy was making miserable. She was crowding Peter, too. Night after night, I could hear her, pressing him for a permanent commitment. Peter was, in many ways, a very young nineteen-year-old. I was almost certain that Christy was the first woman with whom he’d been intimate. He was an innocent kid. My husband used to say that innocence is just a step away from crippling stupidity. He was warning me, not Peter, but my son’s unquestioning acceptance of people made him vulnerable, too. Peter wasn’t stupid, but it wouldn’t have taken much for Christy to convince him that a sexual relationship needed to be legitimized.

By Easter, Christy seemed to be a permanent part of our lives; she was the problem without a solution. Then one day Peter came home and told me he had taken a job at a vet clinic in Swift Current until the fall semester started. It seemed too good to be true.

“What about Christy?” I asked.

“It’s over,” he said, and he’d looked so miserable that I hadn’t pressed the matter. I never did find out what had happened between them. I didn’t care. It was finished, and I was grateful. These days when Pete called to talk he sounded relaxed and hopeful. Now, just a little over a month after he’d set us free, it seemed as if we might become entangled again.

“Stay away, Christy,” I said to the warm spring night. “Just please stay away.”

When I walked into the house, the phone was ringing. The old ones used to say that if you mentioned the name of an enemy, you conjured him up. Christy Sinclair wasn’t my enemy, but when I heard her low, husky voice on the phone, I felt a superstitious chill. If I hadn’t said her name aloud, perhaps she wouldn’t have materialized.

As always, she rushed in headlong. “Oh, Jo, it’s wonderful to hear your voice again. Guess what? Pete and I are back together.”

I held my breath. There was still the chance that she was lying, still the possibility that this was just another case where Christy had crossed the line between what she wanted and what was true. But when she spoke again, I knew she hadn’t crossed the line.

“Pete says Greg’s family is throwing a big engagement party at their cottage, Friday – a kickoff for the Victoria Day weekend. He suggested that I ride down with you and the kids. He won’t be able to get there from Swift Current till around seven. Jo, are you still there? Is that all right with you?”

I felt numb. It was all beginning again.

“Yes,” I said, “if that’s what Pete wants, it’s fine with me.”

“Great,” she said. “What time should I come over?”

“Around four, I guess. I thought we’d leave as soon as Angus got back from school.”

“Great. Four o’clock tomorrow. I’m counting the minutes.”

I walked down the hall to Mieka’s room and knocked on the door. She was sitting on her bed reading a bride’s magazine, and when she saw me, she laughed and hid the magazine behind her back.

“My name is Ditzi with an
i
,” she said in the singsong cadence of a
TV
mall stomper. “Oh, Mum, I can’t believe I’m reading this. But since I am, what do you think of that one?” She pointed to a dress that was all ruffles and lace. “It has a hoop sewn into the skirt.”

“I guess it would be all right if you were marrying Rhett Butler,” I said, sitting down next to her. “Whatever would you do with something like that afterwards?”

Mieka raised an eyebrow. “Frankly, my dear,” she said, “I wouldn’t give a damn.”

It was good to see her laugh, but as I told her about Christy’s phone call, her face fell.

“Poor Peter. What are we going to do, Mum?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Remember what you said about the wrestling? It’s his life. We’ll be nice to Christy and hope for the best.”

But at four o’clock the next day, as I watched Christy Sinclair get out of her car, I knew that being nice and hoping for the best were going to be hard.

Even her red Volkswagen convertible brought back memories. At the end of her relationship with Peter, I had felt my heart sink every time the Volks had pulled into our driveway. But I tried to be positive. Christy looked great. She always did. She wasn’t a beautiful woman, but she had a lively androgynous charm – slim hips, flat chest, dark curly hair cut boy short. And she always dressed the part. Christy was estranged from her family, but she said they always made sure she had the best of everything. Today, for a trip to the country she looked like she’d stepped out of an L.L. Bean ad: sneakers, white cotton overalls and a blue-and-white striped shirt. As soon as she saw me standing in the doorway, she ran up and threw her arms around me. She smelled good, of cotton and English soap and sunshine.

“I’ve missed this family,” she said, her voice breaking. Then she stood back and looked at me. “And I’ve missed you most of all, Jo.” She smiled.

It was hard not to respond to that smile. Christy’s best feature was her mouth; it was large, mobile, expressive. Theodore Roethke wrote a poem where he talks about a young girl’s sidelong pickerel smile; Christy Sinclair’s smile was like that – whimsical, sly and knowing.

“We had some good times,” I said. It seemed a neutral enough statement.

“Right,” she said, and this time there was no mistaking the mocking line of her mouth. “Good times, Jo.” She reached over and picked up a suitcase and threw it into the trunk of my car. “And we’re going to have more.”

Her words were defiant, but there was a vulnerability in her voice that hadn’t been there before. She sounded almost desperate, and I was grateful when the kids came barrelling out of the house. In the flurry of bags being stowed in the car and the greetings and last-minute instructions to the girl next door who was going to take care of the dogs, I didn’t have to weigh the words I would say to Christy.