Verdict in Blood (29 page)

Taylor and I didn’t stay long. After his revelation, Garnet Dishaw seemed somehow spent, and I was increasingly anxious to get in touch with Alex. Besides, we were no longer alone. The Saskatchewan–Toronto football game was being televised, and the residents of Palliser Place, decked out in the green and white, were arriving to cheer on the Roughriders.

We walked Garnet back to his room. Before he went inside, he shook hands with Taylor, then he took both my hands in
his. “Be careful, Mrs. Kilbourn. We’ve already sacrificed one fine woman to this madness.”

“I’ll be careful,” I said. I took the bottle of Johnny Walker out of my bag and passed it to him. “And I’ll come back to help you make a dent in this.”

His voice was firm. “Do I have your word on that?”

“You have my word,” I said.

In the time we had been inside Palliser Place, the wind had picked up and the rain had grown heavier. Taylor and I had a soggy run to our car. As we drove home, Taylor, keyed-up by her visit and by the wildness of the night, prattled happily, but I was suddenly exhausted. It had been a long day, and the ache in my muscles and the soreness in my throat now made undeniable a fact I had spent the day denying: I was sick.

Spurred on by our agreement that she could watch half an hour of
Anne of Green Gables
after she’d had her bath, Taylor went straight upstairs. As soon as I heard the water running, I went into the family room to call Alex. When I picked up the phone, the beep indicating that I had a message was insistent. I tapped in our password. At first there was silence, and I thought the call was a prank. Then I heard Eli’s voice, very agitated. “I’m a bad person,” he said. “I’ve done bad things. It was her mother who died. I saw it on
TV
. I had to tell her about the blood. There was so much blood. It was everywhere.” The line went dead. I replayed the message. Even when I was prepared for Eli’s words, they chilled me. I dialled the number of the apartment. Alex answered on the first ring.

“It’s me,” I said. “Is Eli there with you?”

“I don’t know where he is, Jo. When I came home the door to the apartment was open, but he was gone.”

“He called us,” I said. “There was a message on the
machine when Taylor and I got home tonight.” I relayed Eli’s words.

“But he didn’t say anything about where he was going?”

“No, but, Alex, I think I understand part of this. The six o’clock news showed that press conference announcing Terrence Ducharme’s release. There was some file footage on Justine’s murder. Eli must have seen it. I guess he hadn’t realized till tonight that Justine was Signe’s mother.”

“And he called Signe Rayner to talk about it? God, Jo, I hope you’re wrong. After I saw you today, I called her to tell her we thought it was time Eli tried another therapist. She went nuts. I’m no expert, Jo, but I would think that patients change therapists all the time. Signe Rayner acted as if I was betraying her. She told me I was ruining Eli’s chances for recovery, then she started in about how Eli had done all these terrible things and how nothing he said could be believed.”

“But she was his doctor. She was supposed to be on his side.”

Alex’s voice was tense. “I’ve got to find him, Jo.”

“I’ll come with you.”

“No, stay there,” he said. “Eli tried to get in touch with you once. He might try again.”

I hung up. Tense and restless, I walked to the window. Even through the glass, I could hear the wind keening as it tossed leaves and litter through the air. Eli was out there somewhere, alone in the unforgiving night. Rose, who hated storms so much she never left my side until the weather calmed, whimpered. I reached down to rub her head. “It’ll be over soon, Rose,” I said, but as I gazed at the darkness, I wondered if the fear and the uncertainty ever truly would be over.

Miserable, I turned away. Propped on the mantel till it
dried was Taylor’s painting of the dragon-boat crew that would never be. It seemed that a hundred years had passed since that perfect night when Alex and the kids and I had walked home from the lake and made our plans for next year.

I repeated Eli’s words aloud. “I’ve done bad things. There was so much blood.” Two sentences, but they opened the floodgate. Details I’d been struggling to hold back since Labour Day overwhelmed me: Eli at the football game telling Angus, “Sometimes I’d just like to kill you all.” Alex’s memory of Eli showering and changing into fresh clothes hours after Justine’s murder. Eli’s inability to remember anything that happened from the time he disappeared at the football game until he walked into Dan Kasperski’s office. The crude brutality of the decapitated horse splashed over Taylor’s dragon-boat painting. The recklessness with which Eli whirled our croquet mallet above his head, the same mallet that would be brought with such force against Hilda’s skull that it would almost kill her.

Juxtaposed, the pictures formed a montage, dark with potential violence, but the composite was incomplete. There were other images of Eli, not the terrifying spectre of my worst imaginings, but the gentle boy with the shy smile who had worried about Mieka’s unborn baby and looked at me with hopeful eyes the night I’d visited him in the hospital and talked about a school where he might feel safe. This Eli had worried that Taylor might feel left out and had brought Dilly Bars for dinner so I wouldn’t have the bother of cleaning up. Something had gone terribly wrong Labour Day weekend. But remembering the Eli I knew, I was as certain as I could be of anything that, whatever Eli’s connection was with those unknown events, he had been more sinned against than sinner.

I was still transfixed by the dragon-boat picture when Taylor ran into the room. Sweet-smelling and rosy from her bath, she came over, stood by me, and looked up at her painting. “Which one do you like better, this one or the one we gave Eli?”

“Well, I like the way Mieka and Greg and Madeleine and Hilda are in this one.”

“You’re in it, too,” Taylor said.

“So I am. And guess what? I may have an idea about somebody to sit in that empty place next to me.”

“Who?”

“Alex.”

“Good,” she said. “I miss him.” She narrowed her eyes at the picture. “This one’s okay, but I like the way the water looked in the other one.”

“That’s because the perspective was different. You painted the race the way it looked from higher up.”

She gave me a look of exasperation. “I know,” she said. “I was standing on that hill up by that Boy Scout thing.”

I whirled to face her. “What?”

“That thing with the stones. From up there it looked like Angus and Eli had a wall of water in front of them. So that’s what I painted, and I put me in too. Now, let’s watch the movie.” She slipped the video into the
VCR
and scrambled onto the couch. “Come on,” she said. “It’s starting.”

From the time the opening credits rolled, Taylor was rapt, but my brain was racing as I ran through the sequence of events that fateful Labour Day weekend. Until that moment, I had seen the area in which we watched the races and the Boy Scout memorial where Justine was murdered as the focal points of two different tales. In fact, the places were separated from one another by less than fifty metres.

“There was so much blood.” That’s what Eli had said.
What if … ? As
Anne of Green Gables
opened, I began to put together a hypothesis. Within half an hour, Taylor had fallen asleep in my arms, and I had a conjecture worth testing. All I had to do was wait for Eli to show up, so we could test it together.

At 9:30, I heard a car pull into the driveway. I leapt up and ran to the window, but it wasn’t Eli and Alex, it was my son.

Angus was in an expansive mood. “It was the
best
evening. I didn’t think it was going to be, but Rabbi Drache is a great guy. He knows everything. He’s so smart, Mum, and he likes football. We watched the game.”

“Who won?” I said.

“The Argos,” Angus said. “But I didn’t mind. Rabbi Drache was like a little kid. He was so wired.” He stood up. “Anyway, I have a quiz in English tomorrow, so I should probably read the story.”

“What’s the story?” I asked.

“ ‘The Painted Door,’ ” he said. “It’s not bad. Do you want me to carry Taylor up to bed?”

“Oh, Angus, would you?” My voice sounded uncharacteristically plaintive.

For the first time since he’d walked into the room, my son really looked at me. “Is everything okay?”

“We don’t know where Eli is,” I said.

Angus’s body tensed. “Should I go look for him?”

“No, stay here. If he calls, I might need to go and pick him up.” I began coughing, and I couldn’t seem to stop.

“Are you getting a cold, Mum?”

“I’m not getting a cold, Angus. I’ve
got
a cold, but at the moment, I’m not planning to do anything more strenuous than make myself some tea and sit around waiting for the phone to ring.” I smiled at my son. “Don’t look so worried, it’ll take me back to my college days.”

Rose stayed glued to me when I walked into the kitchen to fill the kettle. “You really are a major-league suck,” I said. She looked wounded, but she didn’t move. “Well, at least let’s sit down while we wait for the water to boil.” Rose started to follow me to the table, but suddenly she stopped, veered towards the back door, and began to bark. She and I had been together for a long time; as a rule, she trusted me to get the message after a couple of perfunctory woofs, but this time she was adamant. I went over to her, flicked on the yard lights, and opened the back door. The wind was still howling, and it blew a scattering of sodden leaves onto my kitchen floor. I nudged Rose with my toe. “Go on,” I said. “If you have to go,
go
. The sooner you get out there, the sooner you can come back in.”

My tone was sharp, but Rose, who was usually preternaturally sensitive, didn’t budge; she just stood on the threshold, barking.

“There’s nothing out there,” I said, but as I started to shut the door, I saw that I was wrong. A slender figure in bluejeans and a white T-shirt was shinnying over the back fence. Even a quick glance was enough for me to recognize Eli’s lithe grace. I walked out on the deck and called his name, but he’d already disappeared into the laneway. I ran down the deck stairs to the lawn. When I opened the back gate, the wind caught it and banged it against the fence. I stepped out into the alley. The creek was racing the way it did during spring run-off, and the wind was howling, but there wasn’t a living creature in sight. I dashed back inside my yard, grabbed the gate with both hands and pulled it shut. It was only when I latched it that I felt the stickiness on my hands and smelled the paint. As I moved closer to the gate, I was able to see the outline of the black horse. Its message was as clear as a cry for help.

The Lavoline Taylor used to remove paint from her hands was in the carport. After I’d got off most of the black spray paint, I ran back inside, grabbed my coat, and called Angus. “Eli’s out there,” I said. “If Alex checks in, tell him I’ve gone out to look for him.”

“Are you going to bring him back here?”

I shook my head. “I think when we’ve worked everything out, Eli will just want to go home.”

When I pulled out onto Regina Avenue, I decided that, instead of heading directly for Albert Street, I’d double-back along the lane. Somehow, I couldn’t believe that, having worked up the courage to come to our house, Eli would simply run away again. The decision was a good one. The gravel of our alley was spongy from the rain, and I had to keep the Volvo moving at a snail’s pace. Nonetheless, it didn’t take long to find Eli. As I’d anticipated, he hadn’t gone far. My headlights picked him out, curled up between my neighbour’s back fence and our communal garbage bin. I jumped out of the car and ran to him.

“Come on, Eli. You and I have things we need to talk about.”

“Just leave me.”

“I’m not going to leave you.”

“You don’t know what I’ve done.”

“You didn’t do anything.”

“You don’t know.”

“But I do know. Get in the car with me, and I’ll explain. If you’ll give me a chance, I can show you that you didn’t do anything wrong.”

After a few seconds, he slowly got to his feet and headed for the car. Without a word, he slid into the passenger seat, closed the door, and sat, staring straight ahead. I glanced over at him. “Are you okay?”

Eli nodded. The light from the alley threw the carved beauty of his profile into sharp relief. Except for the trembling of his lower lip, he was absolutely still.

The road that winds through Wascana Park offers few places to pull over, so I drove straight to the cul-de-sac Justine had parked in the night of her death. It was behind an information booth that heralded the pleasures of Regina, the Queen City. The booth wasn’t much: a Plexiglas-protected map of the area; a display case filled with posters of past and future events; a public telephone; and a clear view of both the Boy Scout memorial and the shoreline from which we’d watched the races.

I turned to Eli. “Look down there and tell me what happened that night after you decided you couldn’t stay at the football game with us.”

“Noooooo.” The word ululated into a moan.

“Okay,” I said quickly. “Let’s go back to a better time. We’re at the game. All of us. We were having fun. Then you and Angus went off for nachos.”

“Just a fucking Indian,” he said furiously.

I took his hand. “That’s what the man said, and you were hurt and angry. Eli, tell me what happened next.”

“I walked down Winnipeg Street – found some guys. They were doing solvent. They wanted me to do it too, but I wouldn’t.”

“Good for you,” I said. “Then what happened?”

“I didn’t know where to go.” His voice broke. “I couldn’t go home. I didn’t want to disappoint my uncle again.”

“He loves you, Eli. You couldn’t disappoint him.”

“Don’t make me do this,” he said miserably.

I stroked his hand. “We have to,” I said. “Now, you decided you couldn’t go home, so you came back here to where we watched the races.”

“Not on purpose,” he said. “At least I don’t think so. I was just walking, and I ended up here.” He smiled. “But it
was
nice to remember. I guess I fell asleep.”