Verdict in Blood (5 page)

“A positive one,” Hilda said drily.

“Maybe,” he said. “But if it was, it was the only one. Of course, Justine saw quitting smoking as just one of many positive changes she made in her life after she met Wayne J. Waters. Did she talk to you about him?”

Hilda nodded.

“Then you know what an impact he had on her. It was insane. Justine had always had a built-in radar for bullshitters, but Wayne J. seemed to slide in under the beam. She told me that meeting him was her ‘moment of revelation.’ I tried to make her see how nuts that was. ‘Like Paul on the road to Damascus,’ I said. I was sure she’d laugh. Justine didn’t have much use for religion.”

“But she didn’t laugh,” I said.

He sighed. “No,” he said. “She was very earnest. She said, ‘If you consider the moment on the road to Damascus a metaphor for a life-altering experience, then your comparison couldn’t be more apt.’ ”

To this point, Hilda had been silent, taking it all in. When she spoke, I could hear the edge in her voice. “So Justine
was
aware that her life had altered radically. She didn’t just slide into this new pattern of behaviour.”

“Oh no,” he said. “She was fully aware that things were different.”

“Then your assessment that Justine wasn’t in complete possession of her faculties hinges solely on the fact that you found the choices she was making repellent.”

Eric Fedoruk grinned sheepishly. “You would have made a dynamite lawyer, Miss McCourt.” He got to his feet. “Now, I really have taken up enough of your time. I’m sorry to have cast a shadow over the last long weekend of summer, but I needed to know how things stood.”

He started for the door, but Hilda laid her hand on his arm, restraining him. “I wonder if you could leave me your business card, Mr. Fedoruk.”

He pulled his wallet out of his back pocket, took out a card and a pen. “I’ll jot down my home phone number too. I’m not always the easiest guy in the world to get hold of.” He scrawled his number on the card and handed it to Hilda.

She looked at it thoughtfully. “You’ll be hearing from me,” she said. “Last night, Justine Blackwell asked a favour of me. Her death doesn’t nullify that request. She wanted me to look after her interests, and that’s exactly what I intend to do.”

Eric Fedoruk furrowed his brow. “We
are
on the same side in this matter. I hope you understand that.”

“Allegiances are earned, not assumed,” Hilda said. “I hope
you
understand that.” She smiled her dismissal. “Thank you for coming by. Your visit was most instructive.”

When the door closed behind Eric Fedoruk, I turned to Hilda. “Were you throwing down the gauntlet?” I asked.

She shook her head. “Just alerting Mr. Fedoruk to the fact that I’m a woman who takes her responsibilities seriously.” She squared her shoulders. “If your afternoon’s clear, Joanne, would you be willing to join me in paying a condolence call? I telephoned Justine’s daughters while you were napping. They’re expecting me at two-thirty. It would be good to have a companion with me whose judgement I trust.”

Half an hour later, we were on our way. Hilda had replaced her peasant skirt with a seersucker dress the colour of a ripe apricot and covered her fiery red hair with a summer hat, a straw boater with a striped band that matched her outfit. I was wearing a white linen shirt and slacks. When I came downstairs, Hilda nodded her approval. “Very nice. Thank heavens we’ve jettisoned that hoary rule about summer’s colours being appropriate only during the weeks between May 24 and Labour Day.” She picked up her clutch bag from the cedar chest in the hall. “Now, it’s already two-fifteen, so I suppose we’d better step lively.”

From my kitchen window I could see the creek that separated my neighbourhood, Old Lakeview, from Justine Blackwell’s, an area of handsomely curved, pleasingly landscaped streets known, accurately if unimaginatively, as The Crescents. Justine Blackwell’s home was almost at the end of Leopold Crescent. I had walked by her place a hundred times, and I’d never ceased to admire it. It was a heritage house and unique: cobalt-blue Spanish-tile roof, white stucco walls artfully studded with decorative tiles, and
windows of styles so varied and delightful that I’d once taken a book on turn-of-the century architecture out of the public library just to look them up. Their names had been as evocative as the windows themselves: Oriel, Lancet, Mullioned, Œil-de-bœuf, Catherine wheel.

The front door of 717 Leopold Crescent was oak, framed at the top by a graceful semicircular window that my reading had taught me was known as fanlight. The effect was, as Eric Fedoruk would have said, elegant.

From the moment Hilda suggested paying a condolence call on Justine’s family, I had felt an adolescent thrill at the prospect of meeting Lucy Blackwell face to face. Her name summoned forth a kaleidoscope of images that were part of the cultural history of every woman my age. In the youthquake of the late sixties, Lucy had been a Mary Quant girl in thigh-high clear plastic boots and leather mini, her eyes doe-like behind the kohl eyeliner and fake eyelashes, her hair ironed into smooth sheets the colour of pulled taffy.

She had been a ripe sixteen when she recorded the first song that brought her recognition. The song was called “Lilacs,” and she had written it herself. Its subject, the painful process of losing a first love to a heartless rival, was an adolescent cliché, but Lucy’s treatment of the angst-ridden convention rocked between low farce and elegy, and her voice was a husky sensation.

In the seventies, shod in sandals hand-tooled in Berkeley by people who’d got their priorities straight and wearing granny gowns of hand-dyed batik, Lucy had woven flowers in her hair and sung songs of misplaced faith and love gone wrong that became anthems for a generation of middle-class kids raised in the warm sunshine of Dr. Spock but yearning for the storm of sexual adventure. We mined the lyrics of each new song for autobiographical details. Was that “singin’ man” who left her on the beach, “cryin’ and dyin’ as the tide
washed in,” James Taylor or Dylan? When she sang of “that small white room where I left behind a gift I could never retrieve,” was she remembering the abortion clinic in which, it was whispered, she had gone to have Mick Jagger’s baby cut away? It was heady stuff.

When the decade ended, she settled down somewhere on Saltspring Island with a man none of us had ever heard of and announced she was going to raise a family and write an opera for children. For a time she disappeared, and it seemed Lucy Blackwell was destined to become a candidate for a trivia-quiz answer. Then, in the early eighties, she surfaced again. She was alone and empty-handed: no man, no babies, no opera, but there was savage light in her eyes and a new and feral quality in her voice. Within a year, she’d written the score for a movie and the music for an off-Broadway show; both were hits. She was back, and with her beautiful hair permed into an explosion of Botticelli curls, her body hard-muscled from feel-the-burn exercise, and her voice knife-edged with danger, she was the very model of the eighties woman.

For three decades, Lucy Blackwell had been the first to catch the wave, but the woman who stood before me that Labour Day afternoon seemed to have left trendiness behind. She was barefoot, wearing bluejean cut-offs and a man’s white shirt, with the sleeves rolled up to reveal a dynamite tan. Her eyes were extraordinary, so startlingly green-blue that they were almost turquoise, and her shoulder-length hair shone with the lustre of dark honey. Lucy was a Saskatchewan-born forty-five-year-old, but she had the long-limbed agelessness of the prototypical all-American girl.

“Thank you for coming,” she said, extending her hand. She was holding an old-fashioned scrub brush, and when she noticed it, she laughed with embarrassment and lifted it in
the air. “Trying to fix what can’t be fixed,” she said distractedly. “I’m Lucy Blackwell. Won’t you come in?”

Hilda and I followed her through the entranceway and down the hall. The parquet floors along which we walked were scuffed and sticky underfoot, and the air was heavy with the rotting-fruit smell of forgotten garbage. “I hope you don’t mind if we visit in the dining room,” Lucy said. “My mother had some curious guests in the last year. The dining room’s the only room in the house that doesn’t look as if 2 Live Crew has been playing a concert in it.”

The room was a damaged beauty. A wall broken by lancet windows looked out onto the yard. The shell-pink silk curtains that bracketed the view were coolly ethereal, but they were stained at child level. A rose Berber carpet that must have cost a king’s ransom was discoloured by the kind of patches that are left by dog urine. Lucy motioned us to sit down at the mahogany dining table. The creamy needlepoint on the backs and seats of the chairs was soiled, but the wood gleamed and there was a scent of lemon oil in the air. A bucket of soapy water rested on a stool near the sideboard.

“I’ve been scouring away in here all day,” Lucy said. “But no matter what I try, nothing seems to help.” She pointed with her brush. “Look at them,” she said, indicating walls covered in silk of a pink so delicate the colour seemed almost illusory. Figures were woven into the fabric: Ruben-esque women, epicurean and lush. The wall-covering must have been a treasure once, but someone had desecrated the women’s bodies. Crude breasts and genitalia were drawn in marker over the delicate lines in the fabric. Lucy had obviously been scrubbing at them; the places where she had worked were marked by ugly spoors of damp colour.

“When we were young, my mother wouldn’t allow us to eat in this room. It was for adults only,” she said. There was
an intimate teasing quality in Lucy’s voice that seemed to draw us into her orbit. “But if my parents had a dinner party,” she continued, “my father would call us down to meet the guests. It was so exciting. Of course, my sisters and I would be all shined up for bed. I can still remember how soft the rug felt under my bare feet when we trooped in to be introduced. It was always so shadowy and scary in the hall, but the candles in here would be blazing.”

“ ‘Three little girls in virgin’s white, swimming through darkness, longing for light,”
I said.

Lucy shot me a radiant smile. “You remembered.”

“ ‘My Daddy’s Party’ is a pretty memorable song,” I said.

“Thanks. That means a lot. Especially now.” She looked around the room, and when she spoke again, her voice quivered with rage and hurt. “I haven’t been in this room in years. Somehow, I’d hoped on this visit …” She swallowed hard. “Too late now. We’ll never get things back the way they were. Metaphors aren’t much fun in real life.”

“Perhaps you should get professionals in to do this work,” Hilda said gently. “As you’re discovering, a home is a powerful symbol for those who live within it.”

Lucy ran her fingers through her hair. “I guess that’s why my sister Signe thinks trying to put things right in these rooms is good therapy for me. My other sister says it’s a way of making up for my sins of omission.”

“What do you think?” I asked.

“It doesn’t matter what I think. The prodigal daughter doesn’t get a vote.” She laughed sadly. “I’m forgetting my manners. Can I get you a drink? The Waterford crystal my father bought my mother on their honeymoon is pretty much a write-off, but there must be a jam-jar or two around.”

“We’re fine,” Hilda said. “Mrs. Kilbourn and I aren’t planning to stay, but, Lucy, there is something I’d like to talk to you and your sisters about. Will they be able to join us?”

“Signe will. Tina isn’t seeing people right now.”

Lucy left to get her sister, and I walked over and looked out at the scene framed by the window. Zinnias, asters, and marigolds, prides of the late summer garden, shimmered in the gold September haze. A boy pushing a power-mower made lazy passes across the lawn. Heat hung in the air. Hilda came and stood beside me. The scene was idyllic, but I could feel my friend’s fury.

“Why would anyone set that poor woman the Sisyphean task of cleaning up this disaster and tell her it was her way of making up for what she did or failed to do?” she asked.

“She does seem to be near the breaking point,” I said.

“My sister doesn’t break.”

The voice, as huskily melodic as Lucy’s, came from behind us. I turned, expecting to greet a stranger, but I knew the woman standing in the entrance to the dining room. Eli Kequahtooway had introduced us. She was his therapist.

“Hello, Dr. Rayner,” I said.

She gazed at me, perplexed. “You’ll have to forgive me,” she said, “I don’t remember …”

“There’s no reason to,” I said. “We only met once – at the Cornwall Centre. I’m Joanne Kilbourn, a friend of Eli Kequahtooway’s.”

“Of course,” she said. “I remember thinking Eli must be fond of you to bring you over to me.”

“I hope he is,” I said. “I’m certainly fond of him. Dr. Rayner, this is my friend Hilda McCourt.”

She took Hilda’s hand. “It’s Signe – please. My mother spoke of you often, Miss McCourt, and always with great respect.”

“I’m flattered,” Hilda said evenly. “Your mother was an extraordinary woman.”

Signe Rayner gave Hilda an odd little smile. “There’s no disputing that,” she said drily. She gestured towards the
dining-room table. “Shall we continue this conversation sitting down?”

Her offer seemed to be as much for her benefit as ours. She was a large woman, as tall as Lucy but much heavier, so heavy, in fact, that standing for any length of time must have been uncomfortable for her. She was wearing an ivory-and-black African-print gown which had affinities to both the muumuu and the caftan without being either. She had been wearing the garment’s twin, in shades of coffee and taupe, the day Eli introduced her to me in the mall. Signe Rayner had impressed me then as a woman of self-confident authority, but it appeared her ability to dominate situations didn’t extend to her family.

Lucy Blackwell came back into the room just as her sister pulled out a chair at the head of the table. As Signe settled in, Lucy’s smile was wicked. “You’ll notice how Signe chooses the seat of command. She’s a psychiatrist, so watch your step.”