Verdict in Blood (18 page)

She smiled in recognition when she saw me, but still insisted on seeing a piece of
ID
, and I was relieved at her thoroughness.

Intubated and wired, Hilda looked impossibly small, but she’d lost the ashen look that had frightened me so much when I found her in the kitchen the night before. I bent to kiss her forehead, then opened my purse and took out a photograph I’d taken of her at the lake. She was sitting in our canoe, paddle poised. As always, she was dressed for the occasion, this time in white shorts, a navy-and-white striped gondolier’s shirt, a bright orange lifejacket, and a straw boater to keep the sun off her extravagant red curls.

I taped the picture to the head of her bed. “This is so everyone will know what a knockout you are,” I said. Then, heeding Nathan’s advice, I began to talk. At first, I was self-conscious, then, despite the grim surroundings, I found myself relaxing into the easiness I always felt when I was with Hilda. I talked about everything that was on my mind: Mieka’s baby; seeing Keith Harris again; my fears about the deterioration in my relationship with Alex; the dinner I was planning with Jill. I was careful to avoid any mention of Justine and her troubled family in my monologue. I was amazed when I looked at my watch and saw it was already 3:20. I kissed her forehead again. “I’ll be back after supper,” I said. “And this time I’ll bring a book to read to you.”

Taylor and I arrived at the house together. “Perfect timing,” I said.

She beamed. She followed me into the kitchen and, as I prepared the chicken, she told me her about her day. It had been a good one. Ms. Anweiler had picked her to be the class monitor for the week ahead. Taylor was going to have a chance to show how responsible she was. I asked if she wanted a dress rehearsal in responsibility, and she agreed to set the table and wash the potatoes while I went out to the garden.

The herbs in our clay pots were flagging, but there was still tarragon, and the parsley was plentiful if drooping.
Whatever the state of our parsley crop, my late husband, Ian, had always revelled in quoting his mother’s aphorism: “Parsley thrives in a house where the wife dominates.” As I snipped herbs for the chicken, I thought, not for the first time, how good it would be to have a husband to laugh with and to lean against. I was tired of dealing with problems alone, tired of having no one to pick up the baton when I dropped it, tired, to use an old friend’s telling image, of being “always a driver, never a passenger.”

Keith Harris and I had talked vaguely of marriage when we were together, and I think at some level I believed it was a likelihood. There were no impediments. He had never married. My kids liked him, and the fact that he was Greg’s uncle was icing on the cake. We were the same age; in fact, we shared a birthday. Other people approved of us as a couple; I approved of us as a couple. Then he found someone else, and my fantasy that Keith and I would walk hand in hand through the golden years faded.

Alex and I had never talked of marriage. We had been content to enjoy the here and now, but lately even the here and now had been riddled with tensions. That day, as I bent to pick tomatoes for dinner, I wondered whether what we had had ever really been enough for either of us.

When the chicken was in the oven, I walked out to Taylor’s studio and told her about Hilda. I was honest, but I didn’t dwell on the worst possibilities. We would jump off that particular bridge when and if we came to it. Taylor’s reaction surprised me. She loved Hilda, and she was a child whose emotions were close to the surface, but that afternoon she took the news calmly.

When I finished she said, “Is Hilda going to die?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know.”

Taylor looked at me steadily. “She talked to me about this.”

“When?” I asked.

“At the cottage. I told her that next summer I’d be able to swim right across the lake, the way Eli’s mum did. And I said, ‘Promise you’ll be there,’ and she said she couldn’t promise, because a promise was a serious thing and she might not be able to keep it because she was old and nobody lives forever.”

“Did she say anything else?”

Taylor nodded. “She said she’d had more fun than anybody.”

I touched my daughter’s cheek. “Let’s hope there’s more fun ahead,” I said. I left Taylor painting and went back in the house. The next day in my senior class, we were dealing with federal–provincial relations during the eighties. I’d lived it, but I didn’t remember it, so I had some serious boning up to do.

The small room I used for an office was down the hall from the kitchen. As soon as I saw my desk, I knew that Jill’s assessment had been right. It was a mess, but it wasn’t a mess I’d made. I started sifting through the chaos. Nothing appeared to have been taken. Whoever had ransacked my desk obviously had concerns larger than unmarked freshman papers and academic articles. Before I’d left for Saskatoon, Hilda had told me she was planning to spend Saturday night working on Justine’s personal financial records. But I hadn’t noticed any papers that might have belonged to Justine in our house. I went upstairs to Hilda’s room. It was pristine. The only evidence that Hilda had stayed there was her library books, which were neatly stacked on Mieka’s old desk by the window. There were no papers. I checked the family room, and the dining room. There was nothing. I called Jill, but she was gone for the day. Then I called the police. The officer I spoke to took my information without comment, but she seemed interested,
and she made certain she got a number where I could be reached that evening if the investigating officers had further questions.

Perplexed, I went back to my office and picked up an article on the Romanow–Chrétien constitutional tour of 1981. The press had dubbed it the Uke and Tuque show; reading about it, even in the dry language of academe, brought back a lot of memories. I became so absorbed I almost forgot to get the squash ready. It was only after I’d prepared it with butter, brown sugar, and nutmeg, the way Hilda liked it, that I remembered Hilda wouldn’t be at the dinner table to enjoy it.

By the time Jill arrived, the chicken and squash were ready, a casserole of new potatoes was waiting to be micro-waved, and I was slicing tomatoes to sauté with zucchini and onion and garlic. Jill was carrying a bottle of Chablis in one hand and a file folder in the other.

She handed me the folder. “Some interesting stuff in there, but it can wait.” She waved the Chablis. “This, on the other hand, won’t keep for a minute.”

I poured us each a glass of wine.

Jill took hers and raised her glass. “To absent friends,” she said solemnly.

“To absent friends,” I said.

She pulled out one of the kitchen chairs and sat down. “So,” she said, “what’s shaking around here?”

“A mystery,” I said. “That mess you saw on my desk wasn’t of my making.”

She narrowed her eyes. “You mean somebody tossed it?”

“Hilda was working on some financial records that belonged to Justine Blackwell. I think they must have been looking for those. Judging from the fact that the papers are nowhere in evidence, I’m guessing that whoever attacked Hilda found what they were looking for.”

Jill sipped her wine thoughtfully. “This is beyond us, Nancy Drew.”

“I know,” I said. “I’ve already called the police. I’ve done everything I can. So have you. Let’s take the night off.”

“Good plan,” she said. “We can start by refilling our glasses.”

Dinner was less boisterous than usual, but we tried. Angus gave us a rundown on his team’s chances for the coming season; Taylor talked about the trip to the Legislature Ms. Anweiler was taking her class on the next day. Jill had some funny behind-the-scenes stories about NationTV. I recounted Ian’s mother’s parsley story. We all missed Hilda.

After supper, Jill and the kids drove to the Milky Way for ice cream and I went back to the hospital. It had taken a while to decide which book to bring to read to Hilda. There were three on her bedside table: Justine’s
Geriatric Psychiatry: A Handbook
, A. S. Byatt’s
Still Life
, and a translation of Bede’s
Ecclesiastical History
. In my opinion, none quite fit the bill. I was casting about for something when I remembered Hilda’s passion for L.M. Montgomery. So as I stepped into the elevator of the Pasqua Hospital, there was a copy of
Anne of Green Gables
in my hand.

I waved it at Nathan as I walked by the desk. “Ever read this?” I asked.

He looked up from his charts, “No, but I saw the
TV
series when I was fourteen, and I was hot for Megan Follows till I hit Grade 11.”

There was a new police officer outside Hilda’s door. He looked tougher than Mark Messier, and I didn’t stop to chat. I showed him my driver’s licence, went inside, pulled up my chair, and began to read: “Mrs. Rachel Lynde lived just where the Avonlea main road dipped down into a little hollow, fringed with alders and ladies’ eardrops …” As the tubes attached to Hilda delivered their elixirs of antibiotics
and nutrients and carried away her body’s waste, and the machines recorded heartbeats and blood pressure, I kept on reading. I read until the intercom announced that all visitors must leave and Anne, holding the carpet-bag that contained all her worldly goods, entered Green Gables for the first time. When I bent to kiss my friend goodnight, I thought I detected a flicker in her eyelids. As I passed Hilda’s police guard, he looked up at me. “Sorry to see you go,” he said. “I was just getting interested.”

Jill was still there when I got home. Angus and Leah were in the family room studying, and Taylor was in bed, but not asleep.

When she heard me come into her room, she propped herself up on one elbow. “How’s Hilda?” she asked.

“The same,” I said. “But no worse.”

“Is that okay?”

“Yeah,” I said, “that’s okay, at least for now.”

Taylor spotted the copy of
Anne of Green Gables
in the outside pocket of my bag. She leaned over and took it out. “Hilda told me a story from this,” she said. “It was about this girl who dyes her hair green. Hilda said she’d read the whole thing to me at Christmas if I learned to sit still for a book with no pictures.”

When I stood up after kissing my younger daughter goodnight, I was dizzy with exhaustion. The day had finally caught up with me. It took an act of will to force myself to go back downstairs. Jill was sitting at the kitchen table poring over the folder of information on Justine and her circle that she’d brought with her.

“Good stuff in here,” she said. Then she caught sight of my face and frowned. “You look lousy, Jo.”

“That only seems fitting,” I said, “because I feel lousy. Jill, stay as long as you like, but I’m heading for bed.”

Jill pushed her chair back and stretched lazily. “Nope,
I’m out of here. I’ve had enough fun for one day too. But let’s get together after you’ve had a chance to look through that folder. For a figure of judicial rectitude, Justine Blackwell certainly surrounded herself with a compelling cast of characters.”

“More compelling than the characters in
Anne of Green Gables?”

Jill made a face. “Where did that come from?”

“It’s a long story.”

“Well,” said Jill, “considering your state of mind, I won’t press for the particulars. And, to answer your question, Justine’s cast of characters may not be as compelling as Lucy Maud’s, but they’re a hell of a lot more dangerous.”

When I looked at the photo that dominated the front page of our local paper Tuesday morning, my heart began to pound. For a paralysing moment, I was certain that the young aboriginal man being pushed into the police squad car was Eli Kequahtooway. The man’s face was half-turned from the camera, but his dark hair, worn loose except for a single traditional braid, was like Eli’s, and his slender, long-legged body was the same.

Rose and I had just come back from our run around the lake, so I wasn’t wearing my reading glasses. When I finally found them and looked at the picture more closely, I was relieved to see that the man being arrested was older than Eli, perhaps in his early twenties, and that his features were coarser. Still shaken, I glanced up at the headline. The man in the photograph had been charged with Justine Blackwell’s murder.

The accompanying story was short on facts. The man’s name was Terrence Ducharme. He was twenty-three years old, lived in the downtown core, and was employed as a
busboy at the Hotel Saskatchewan, the hotel where Justine had celebrated her thirty years on the bench the night of her murder. I poured myself a cup of coffee, sat down at the kitchen table, and read through the item again. The journalist who had written it treated Ducharme’s arrest as the end of the story, but to my mind there were still too many loose ends. It was entirely plausible that, given her activities in the last year of her life, Justine had encountered Terrence Ducharme. It was even conceivable that she and Ducharme had quarrelled. But where did Hilda fit in? What possible motive could Terrence Ducharme have had for assaulting her? The missing financial papers had to be the link, but what interest could a busboy at the Hotel Saskatchewan have in Justine Blackwell’s banking?

I looked up at the kitchen clock. It was 6:45, not too early for a phone call, especially when I had a credible excuse like needing further information. Alex wasn’t assigned to the case, but he might have facts that weren’t in the papers. I poured myself another cup of coffee, picked up the phone, and dialled Alex’s number.

Eli answered on the first ring. I tried to be matter-of-fact. “Eli, it’s Joanne. How are you doing?”

“I’m okay,” he said.

He didn’t sound okay. His voice was dull, as if he’d been awakened from a deep sleep.

“Are you back at school yet?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “I couldn’t hack it. Dr. Rayner said I didn’t have to.”

“What happened to Dr. Kasperski?”

“I don’t know,” Eli said in his new dead voice. “I guess he quit.”

He fell silent. It was apparent that holding up his end of a conversation, even a bare-bones one like ours, was painful
for him. I didn’t want to add to his misery. “Is your uncle there?” I asked.