A Colder Kind Of Death Part 20

I couldn't sleep. I stared at the fire for what seemed like hours, thinking about my husband and about the dancing ballerinas on the box that contained all that was left of Jenny Rybchuk's life. And I thought about Maureen Gault with her arm raised and her derisive smile. Finally, exhausted, I must have drifted off.

It was the cold air that awakened me. I'd been dreaming about the cabin, and the rifles on the wall, and a ballerina who came in and said Anton Chekhov believed that if there was a gun on the wall in Act I, it had to be fired by the end of Act III.

At first, when I opened my eyes and saw Gary Stephens standing in front of me, I thought I was still dreaming. He was wearing a wide-brimmed rancher's hat and a yellow slicker, and he looked like the kind of mythic figure who would appear in a dream. Then I saw the rifle in his hands, and I knew this was real. I looked at the place on the wall where the rifles were hanging. The rack where the small bush gun had been was empty. It took me a minute to put it all together, but when I did, I knew Act III had begun.

Gary was looking at me intently. "Sylvie said the cops were over tonight asking questions. I thought I'd better get out here and make sure Tess was all right."

"She's all right," I said. "Put down the gun, Gary. I don't think you're in much danger from two unarmed women."

He lay the gun on the window sill beside him. It was still in easy reach, but at least it wasn't pointed at me. Gary moved closer. "What did Tess tell you?"

"Everything," I said.

"You've got to hear my side of it, babe."

Suddenly I was furious. "I think I've already figured out your side of it ... babe. I know what you've done. I just don't understand how you could do it."

His voice was both seductive and pleading. "Then listen to how it was for me. Please, Jo. Please." He paused. "For old times' sake."

"All right, Gary," I said. "I'll listen. For old times' sake."

He arranged his face into an expression of boyish sincerity. "I appreciate the chance, Jo. I really do." He took a deep breath. "None of it would have happened if Sylvie and I had been able to have kids. I know how you love your family, so you must understand it was a pretty hard thing for me to accept."

The narcissism grated. "So you coped," I said, "by having s.e.x with every woman in sight, including your own sister-in-law, and by stealing a young woman's baby?"

He flinched. "All right, all right," he said. "I was a b.a.s.t.a.r.d, but Sylvie was no prize. She wouldn't stop talking about my problem a it was my problem, you know. Anyway, Sylvie wouldn't stop discussing it. It was the same thing every night. Finally, I just stopped coming home. Then, heartbroken but brave, my wife threw herself into her photography. She went down to Chaplin and shot Prairiegirl. That pretty well f.u.c.ked up my political career. Then when she got tired of being the martyr, she decided our marriage was over, and she wanted a divorce."

"My G.o.d, if you hated Sylvie that much, why did you want to stay with her?" I asked.

"Because as lousy it was, it was the only life I had. Jo, what else was I supposed to do? When I was in politics, I'd pretty much let my law practice slide. After my wife's book came out, I didn't have much future in politics. Sylvie had all that money. It didn't make much sense to walk away from it." He shrugged. "I don't know. Maybe I just didn't think it through. But it seemed possible that, if Sylvie had a baby, we could go on the way we had for years, leading separate lives."

"But not lives paid for by separate cheques," I said.

"No," he said. "There were no separate cheques."

"So Jess was just an investment in your future."

He looked down at his hands. "Maybe, at first," he said softly. "But Jo, you've got to believe me. From the minute I saw Jess, everything changed. I held him when he was just seconds old. I think that was first moment in my life when I knew what people meant when they talked about loving someone. It was the best feeling I've ever known. But it didn't last." His beautiful blue eyes clouded with pain. "After Jenny pa.s.sed away, it was hard for me even to be in the same room with Jess. I know how things look, Jo, but I'm not a monster. Every time I looked at my son, I could see Jenny's face. I'd try to block out the memories by getting drunk or by s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g some broad I hardly knew, but no matter what I did, I couldn't forget that night. I've suffered, too, Jo. I love Jess so much, but I can't hold him in my arms without remembering ..."

As he always was when he talked about his son, Gary Stephens was transformed, and, for a moment, I felt myself responding to him. Then I remembered.

"Ian loved his children, too," I said.

He looked at me defiantly. "It wasn't my fault, Jo. Ian was the one who wouldn't leave it alone. That night at the party he told me he'd talked to Rybchuk, and he believed Rybchuk was telling the truth, that something had happened to Jenny. Ian said it didn't make sense that Jenny would say she was going to start a new life with her son, then disappear. I tried to tell him Jenny had probably just changed her mind, but he wouldn't listen. The old man had given him a picture of Jenny with Jess, and Ian was going to take it to the police." For a beat, Gary was silent. Then, in a voice full of wonder, he said, "Ian was always such a f.u.c.king boy scout."

"And the only way to stop the boy scout was to pay Maureen Gault to kill him," I said.

Gary recoiled as if I'd hit him. "For chrissakes, Jo. He was my friend. I would never have asked anyone to murder him. All I did was tell Maureen Gault that Ian was going to be a problem. What happened later wasn't my fault."

"The Becket defence," I said.

Gary's handsome face was blank. "I don't know what you're talking about."

"Didn't you ever study the Becket defence in law school, Gary? It was on the ethics course." I stood up and began moving towards him. "Since you seem to have forgotten anything you ever knew about ethics, I'll help you out.

"It's an old case, and it explores the question of culpability. A king is having trouble with a priest who was once his friend but who's begun meddling in things the king doesn't want meddled with. The king calls in four of his most loyal knights and says 'Will no one rid me of that meddlesome priest?' You'll notice he's careful not to instruct them to do anything wrong, but the knights aren't stupid. They know what the king wants, so they kill the priest. The king, of course, is innocent. It's the knights who did the dirty work. They're the guilty ones. Or are they?" I stepped closer to him. "What do you think, babe? Who's culpable here?"

Gary reached over and picked up his gun. "I'm not guilty of Ian's murder, Jo. The others were just a waste of skin. They deserved to die. But Ian was my, my friend."

On the couch, Tess was stirring.

I raised my voice to awaken her. "Gary, when you told Maureen Gault, 'Ian is going to be a problem,' you knew what you were doing. How much did you have to pay her to get her to kill him?"

He laughed. "You can't know much about Maureen Gault to ask a question like that. Killing was a pleasure for her. When I called her the night of the caucus party and told her Ian was going to the cops, she had a plan worked out before I hung up. All I had to do was drive her to Swift Current. She said she'd find Ian at the funeral, get a ride back to Regina with him, and talk him out of going to the police."

I could feel the rage rising. "Gary, you knew she wouldn't just talk to him. You were in this very room when Maureen Gault smashed her best friend's head in with a poker. You knew what she was capable of."

He looked at me miserably. "I didn't mean for her to kill him. Can't you believe me?"

"No," I said, and my voice was thin with fury.

He took a step towards me. "I loved Ian," he said. "You know that. I loved him."

"No," I said.

His face seemed to crumple. Finally, he whispered, "Can you forgive me, Jo? You can, can't you?"

In the firelight, I could see the tears in his eyes, but I didn't pity him, and, for what seemed like a long time, I didn't answer him. When the words did come, they seemed to tear themselves from a part of me that was beyond reason.

"No!" I shouted. "No! No! No!"

As the final no! hung in the air, a strange sort of calm filled the room. Gary's eyes stayed fixed on mine, then a smile started to form at the corners of his mouth. As slowly as a man moving in a dream, he swung the muzzle of the gun under his chin. For one crazed moment I wondered if the gun was loaded. Then Gary pulled the trigger, and the world exploded.

The next minutes are a jumble. Tess crawled towards the place where Gary had fallen, and I think I went to the phone to call for help. I'm not sure. What I remember are the smells: the hot metal smell of the gun and the smoky smell of the fire and the sweet, fetid smell of blood. And I remember looking down at the body to see if anything at all was left of Gary Stephens's perfect face.

Then the front door opened, and Alex Kequahtooway was there. So were a lot of other cops. The nightmare was over.

It was close to dawn when Alex and I left the cabin. Minutes after the police arrived, a squad car had taken Tess back to the city. Alex had asked if I wanted to go with her, but I hadn't. I'd waited six years, and I wanted to see this through to the end. The forensic specialists were there within an hour, and I sat by the window and watched as they measured and took photographs and put evidence into bags. When they were finished, they left, too. A few minutes later, an ambulance arrived to take Gary Stephens's body back to Regina. I stood at the door as the attendants lifted Gary's body onto the stretcher and carried him outside. As the ambulance pulled onto the grid road and started towards the highway, I turned to Alex. "Is it over now?" I asked.

He nodded and picked up my jacket. I put it on, grabbed Peter's bookbag, and stepped onto the front porch. It was the morning of December 6, but it felt like a spring day. The air, cleansed by the winter rain, was warm on my face, and I could smell the earth.

I looked up towards the road. "Where's Veronica?" I said.

"I had one of the guys drive her back," he said. "I thought maybe you'd rather be a pa.s.senger this time out."

"Fair enough," I said.

"If you think you can eat, Chubby's Cafe makes great bacon and eggs."

"I can eat," I said.

"My car's over there," he said, pointing towards the stand of caraganas that had been planted as a windbreak. "Pretty snazzy for a cop, I know, but I've driven reserve cars all my life, and this was a present to me from me on my fortieth birthday."

"I've always wanted to ride in a silver Audi," I said.

He grinned. "Now's your chance."

When we got to the highway, I touched Alex's arm. "Can we stop for a minute? There's something I want to leave at the place where my husband died."

Alex pulled onto the shoulder. I opened the box of Jenny's mementoes, took out the photograph of her with Jess and got out of the car. The gravel along the side of the highway was still wet from the rain. I knelt down and picked up a stone. It was smooth and cool to the touch. On Hallowe'en night, Hilda McCourt had told me about a poet who said sudden death spatters all we know of denouement across the expedient and wicked stones. I walked further down the shoulder of the highway, picking up stones as I went. When my jacket pockets were full, I walked back to the place where Ian died and began arranging the stones in a circle. When the circle was complete, I put Jenny's picture in the middle and anch.o.r.ed its corners with stones. I tried to think of a prayer, but my mind was empty. Finally, I said, "I did the best I could," and I stood up. Bits of gravel stuck to the knees of my jeans, but I couldn't summon the energy to brush them off. Lightheaded from exhaustion and hunger, I started back to the Audi.

Alex leaned across to open the car door. "Unfinished business?" he asked.

I shook my head. "Not any more," I said. I snapped on my seatbelt, and Inspector Alex Kequahtooway and I drove east towards the rising sun and Chubby's Cafe.

CHAPTER.

14.

By the time Alex and I got back to Regina, the kids were up, dressed, and eating breakfast. The sun was pouring through the kitchen window, and Angus was describing an amazing shot his friend, Camilo, had made at basketball practice the day before. Peter was arguing that n.o.body but Shaquille O'Neal could make a shot like that. Taylor, who knew nothing about basketball but who was second to none in her admiration for Camilo Rostoker, was saying that Camilo could do anything. They seemed so free of care, that I hesitated before I came into the room. I knew I was bringing ugliness with me.

As soon as they saw me, the kids fell silent. I didn't blame them. At Chubby's, I'd seen my reflection in the mirror behind the counter. My skin was ashen, and my eyes were red-rimmed and swollen. At the cafe I had looked like a woman teetering on the edge of shock. I doubted that my appearance had improved much since then.

I started to explain what had happened back at the cabin, but I didn't get far before the horror overwhelmed me. Alex touched my shoulder. "It's too soon," he said. "Go upstairs and get some sleep. I'll tell them."

Safe in my room, I peeled off my clothes and bundled them into the laundry hamper. When I stepped into the shower, I turned the water to hot, closed my eyes, and tried to forget. Ten minutes later, the bathroom was thick with steam, the water coming out of the faucet was cold, and I hadn't forgotten a thing. As I towelled off and headed for bed, I was sick with the fear that the memory of Gary Stephens's suicide would be an albatross I would always carry with me. When I opened the door to my bedroom, I saw that the drapes had been pulled, the phone on my bedside table had been unplugged, and the bedspread had been turned down. Alex was sitting on the windowseat.

"Are you going to be okay?" he asked.

I nodded.

"Good," he said. "There are some things I should take care of down at headquarters, but I'll let the kids know where I'm going to be, and I'll be back around supper. Try to get some sleep."

I tried. All that day, I lay in the dark, listening to the life of my house go on around me, hushed and alien. Late in the afternoon, I opened my eyes and saw Alex standing in the doorway, his silhouette dark against the bright light of the hall.

"Do you want to talk?" he said.

"Not yet. You don't mind, do you?"

"I don't mind. I have to go back downtown, but there's takeout from Bamboo Village in the kitchen. Taylor made some pretty serious inroads on the almond prawns, but there's plenty of everything else."

"Thanks," I said.

"My pleasure," he said and closed the door.

After he left, I fell asleep. When I woke up, it was midnight and I was hungry. I remembered the Chinese takeout and headed downstairs. Sadie and Rose were right on my heels. There had been too many upheavals in their old dog lives, and they were wary.

The cardboard containers from Bamboo Village were neatly stacked on the refrigerator shelf. I'd moved them to the counter and taken the lid off the carton that held the three almond prawns Taylor had left for me when I heard a knock at the front door.

It was Jane O'Keefe.

As soon as I opened the door, she stepped into the hall. She was still wearing her white hospital coat and her picture ID.

I touched her sleeve. "Are you making a house call?" I said.

Jane looked down at the white coat, bewildered. "I thought I'd taken this off and left it in my locker." Her shoulders slumped. "I'm sorry, Jo. I don't even know what I'm doing here. I was just driving around ... I don't want to be alone tonight."

"Neither do I," I said. "Look, I was just going to have some Chinese food. There's plenty."

I opened two bottles of Great Western, and Jane and I filled our plates and sat down at the kitchen table. We ate in silence. When she was through, Jane said, "I don't think I've eaten since yesterday. There's been so much to deal with ..."

"How's Jess?" I asked.

"Scared," she said. "Confused. Sad."

"And Sylvie?"

"She said her goodbyes to Gary a long time ago." Jane's voice went dead. "I wish I had. I was at the hospital this morning when they brought Gary and Tess in."

"Is Tess going to be all right?"

Jane shrugged. "Physically? She should be. It's pneumonia, but I think we got to her in time ..."

"Did you see her?"

Jane shook her head. "No. But I saw Gary. I had a patient in emergency when they brought him in. It was just bad luck." She laughed. "Of course, when it came to Gary, if I hadn't had bad luck, I wouldn't have had any luck at all."

"I'm sorry," I said.

Jane picked up her fork and began tracing a pattern of interlocking circles on her empty plate. She seemed mesmerized. Finally, she said, "At least he didn't suffer."

Images of Gary in the last seconds of his life flashed through my mind: the pleading in his eyes as he asked if I understood, if I forgave; the curious resignation with which he positioned the rifle in the soft flesh beneath his chin.

"No," I said, "he didn't suffer."

Jane's fork hadn't stopped moving. Round and round, round and round it went. "Did he say anything at the end?" she asked softly.

"Let it go, Jane."

"I can't spend the rest of my life not knowing what happened." Her voice was thick with misery. "I loved him, Jo. I need to know why he killed himself."