A Killing Spring (27 page)

As it had been on Tuesday, the front door was propped open with a brick, but this time when I pounded on the inside door, a girl about Taylor’s age opened it and let me in. Flushed with good luck, I ran upstairs and knocked on the door to number 3. A good-looking native kid with a brushcut answered, and as he gave me the once-over, I was able to look past his shoulder and get a glimpse of life in apartment 3 on a Saturday morning. The television was blaring cartoons, and a boy, who judging from his looks was the older brother of the boy who had answered the door, was sitting on the couch. Beside him was the woman I had frightened so badly when I’d come in unannounced on Tuesday. Today, she had a pink ribbon tying back her long dark hair, and, as I watched, the boy reached up and smoothed it with a gesture of such tenderness that I felt my throat catch.

Across the room was the blonde who’d thrown me out. Today she was in blue jeans, a denim jacket, and her Nancy Sinatra boots. She was wholly engrossed in the television. Apparently, she’d been expecting a delivery, because when I came in, she gestured towards the door without looking up. “My purse is on the table, Darrel,” she said. “Give the kid a nice tip.”

“It’s somebody else,” Darrel said. As soon as she heard his words, the blonde woman’s head swivelled towards me. She might have looked like a superannuated superstar Barbie, but she moved like the wind. Within seconds, she was so close to me that our noses were almost touching. “Teacher,” she said in a voice heavy with exasperation. “This is Saturday. No school today. Go home.”

I stood my ground. “I want you to listen to something,” I said. “If you decide you don’t want to hear what I’m saying, stop me. I’ll leave and, I promise you, I won’t bother you again.”

Without waiting for her answer, I pulled
Getting Even
out
of my purse and started to read the story of Karen Keewatin and her sons. I didn’t get far before the blonde reached out and took the book from me.

“Let’s go out in the hall,” she said. “My name’s Bernice Jacobs, and you and I got things to talk about.”

Half an hour later, I was back on the sidewalk outside the apartment on Dahl Street. I was edgy but exhilarated; Bernice Jacobs had not only confirmed my theory about what had happened to Kellee Savage, she’d come up with some theories of her own.

When I saw the little girl who’d let me into the building throwing a ball against the side wall of the apartment, I called out and thanked her. What I had learned from Bernice Jacobs was terrible, but knowledge is a sturdier weapon than ignorance, and I was grateful I didn’t have to go into the battle ahead unarmed.

I was halfway down the block when I heard the kitten’s thin mewing. I almost kept walking. Taylor was the cat person in our family, and I had enough on my plate. But the image of the kerosene-soaked animal I’d seen the first time I’d come to Dahl Street was a powerful spur. I turned and retraced my steps.

The little tortoise-shell had crawled in between two garbage cans in the alley beside the apartment building where Bernice lived. When I moved one of the cans to get a closer look, the kitten struggled to get away. It didn’t get very far. It was dragging its right front leg and, as I watched, it collapsed from the effort. I went back to my car and got the blanket we kept in the trunk in case we got stuck in a blizzard. After I’d wrapped the cat up, I went back to the building on Dahl Street. The little girl was still throwing her ball against the side wall. I could hear her voice, singsonging through the same ball chant I’d used forty years earlier:
“Ordinary, moving, laughing, talking, one hand, the other hand, one foot, the other foot.” When she dropped the ball just before “clap in the front,” I made my move. I pulled the blanket back so she could see the kitten’s face.

“Do you know who this belongs to?” I asked.

She glanced at it without interest. “It don’t belong to nobody.”

“Are you sure?”

She sighed heavily. “It lives on the street,” she said, and she turned away and threw her ball against the wall. “Ordinary, moving …,” she began. I covered the cat again and headed for the Volvo. It was 10:30; our vet stayed open till noon on Saturday mornings.

Dr. Roy Crawford had been our vet for more than twenty-five years. He was a gentle, unflappable man, but he winced when he looked at the cat I’d brought in.

“Can you do anything?” I asked.

He looked at me hard. “It depends.”

“On what?”

“On whether this animal has a home to go to when I’m finished. That leg’s going to need surgery. There’s no point operating on this animal if it’s going to be euthanized in a couple of weeks. Your decision, Mrs. K.”

“It’ll have a home,” I said.

He raised an eyebrow. “With you?”

“Where else?” I said. “Incidentally, is it a male or a female?”

Roy Crawford leaned over and checked out the cat’s equipment. “Male,” he said. Then he smiled. “There’s going to be hell to pay when Benny has to abdicate the throne.”

“Benny won’t abdicate,” I said. “He believes he’s there by divine right. But he is going to have to learn to share the crown.”

By the time I’d signed the papers at Roy’s, it was past
11:00. Herman Masluk had said that since the only two names on Val’s visitors’ list were his and mine, I could go to the hospital whenever it suited me. Eleven o’clock seemed as good a time as any.

I parked in the lot beside the General, made my way past the inevitable cluster of patients and practitioners huddled around the doorway smoking, and headed for the elevators. When I stepped out on the fifth floor, I was facing a desk and a nurse who looked like a defensive lineman. He had a lineman’s professional warmth, too, but when I’d finally satisfied him that my name was on his list, he looked almost cordial. “Can’t be too careful,” he growled.

“You’re telling me,” I said, and I walked down the hall towards room 517.

It surprised me that Val was in his bed. At first, I thought he must be sleeping, but when I called his name, he turned. Then, reminding me of just how young twenty-one really is, he dived under the pillow.

I pulled a chair up and sat by the side of the bed. “We have to talk, Val,” I said, “but I can wait till you’re ready.”

Waiting for Val to decide when to face the inevitable gave me far more time than I needed to check out his room. It was small and relentlessly functional; the only non-institutional touch was a soothing landscape of a pastel boat in which no one would ever sit, drifting serenely on a pastel lake which no ripple would ever disturb. Prozac art.

I’d just begun to wonder if I’d erred in letting Val take the initiative when he sat up, swung his legs over the side of the bed, and faced me. He was wearing a blue-striped hospital gown that seemed designed to strip the wearer of dignity, but Val managed to give even that shapeless garment a certain style.

“It’s my fault she’s dead,” he said, and there was an edge
of hysteria in his voice that frightened me. “I didn’t mean for any of it to happen, but she’s still dead, isn’t she?” His face crumpled, and he buried it in his hands.

I reached out and touched his shoulder. “Yes,” I said, “Kellee’s dead. But, Val, if you can tell me what really happened between you and her, I think we can get at the truth.”

“And the truth will set me free,” he said bitterly.

“No,” I said, “you’ll never be free of this. But the truth might help you put what you did into perspective. Start at the beginning.”

“You know the beginning,” he said. “She was telling lies about …”

“About Tom Kelsoe,” I said.

Val sighed with relief. “I’m so glad he finally decided to talk to somebody about it. Tom always puts other people first. Even when Kellee was trying to destroy him, he protected her. The night he called and told me that she was accusing him of sexual harassment, I said he should go to Professor Gallagher. But you know Tom. All he thinks about is his students. He said that Professor Gallagher would have to expel Kellee, and he didn’t want that.” Val’s voice was filled with the fervour of the acolyte. “But Tom said that for Kellee’s own good she had to learn that a journalist’s reputation for truth must be beyond reproach.”

“So he got you to put Kellee in a position where everyone would believe she was lying.”

Val leapt up from the bed and began pacing. “She was lying about him. Can you imagine anybody lying about a man like Tom Kelsoe? You were at his book launch. You heard what he wrote about Karen Keewatin and her sons. That’s the kind of journalist he is. He sees the dignity in every one, and Kellee was going to destroy him.” Val’s voice broke with emotion. “All I was trying to do was protect the
finest man I’ve ever known, but everything went wrong.”

He was close to the edge, but I had to keep pushing. “Val, what happened at the Owl that night?”

He came back and sat on the bed. “It all happened so fast. I’d been over at Tom’s office, so I was late getting to the Owl. When she saw me, Kellee went crazy. Somehow she’d figured out why I’d been … bothering her. She was very drunk and very hostile. She said she couldn’t trust anybody at the university, so she was going to the media. She started hitting me, and then somebody – I think it was Meaghan Andrechuk – said Kellee had her tape-recorder going. By that time a lot of people had had too much to drink and there was a kind of scene. Then we heard that they’d just announced on
TV
that Reed Gallagher was dead. Kellee was standing in front of me. It was awful. All the blood just went out of her face. At first, I thought she was going to pass out, but she just grabbed her bag and left.”

“Did she take any beer with her?”

Val looked at me curiously. “Beer? No. Why? Did somebody say she had?”

“No,” I said. “I’m sorry. Go on.”

“There’s not much more to tell. I went after Kellee. She was over the edge. I was afraid she really was going to go to the media. When I got outside, I saw that she was walking in the direction of the J school, so I followed her.” Val shook his head. “I watched until she went inside. Believe it or not, I thought the worst was over. I figured she’d just go into the cafeteria and drink coffee until she’d sobered up.”

“And that was the last you saw of her.”

“Yes, I was pretty much out of the party mood by then, so I just drove home.”

“And people saw you there?”

“Friday’s my Father’s poker night. All the real men in town were sitting in his living room drinking rye and
smoking Player’s. I sat in the game until three in the morning.”

“But you didn’t go to bed after that, did you? You went back to the campus to make sure there was nothing on Reed Gallagher’s computer that would incriminate Tom Kelsoe.”

“Tom phoned me at home. He laid the situation out for me. No one knew what Kellee Savage had told Professor Gallagher. And now that he was dead, there was no way we could explain the truth to him. Tom said the last thing Professor Gallagher would have wanted to leave behind was a legacy of lies.” Val raked his hands through his hair. “Dr. Kilbourn, I know it’s hard to understand the vandalism, but Tom said that this was a case of doing the wrong deed for the right reason.”

“And that made sense to you?”

“Yes,” he said. “It did. I really screwed up, didn’t I?”

“I guess the important thing right now is that you don’t compound the error. Val, you do know that what you tried to do Thursday night didn’t make anything better. You’re not going to try that particular exit again, are you?”

He blushed. “No, that was stupid.”

“Good, because you’ve got a great life ahead of you.”

“Yeah, right.”

I took his hand. “I am right, Val. Check it out. After I go, why don’t you ask the nurse if you can take a little walk around the hospital. Try to find one person in this whole place who has as much going for him as you do.”

I opened my purse, took out the paper with the C.P. Snow quote, and handed it to him. “Your father asked me to bring this for him,” I said. “You can read it if you like.”

He unfolded the paper. “ ‘The love between parent and child is the only love that must grow towards separation.’ ” Val looked at me uncomprehendingly. “Why would my father want this?”

I squeezed his hand. “Maybe because he knows you’re not the only one who screwed things up.”

Jill’s plane wasn’t coming in till 4:30, so after lunch I took Taylor and her friend Jess over to the Marina for ice cream. It was a bright, windy day, and on the lawn in front of the museum, people were flying kites. After the kids and I got our ice cream, we took it back to the museum lawn, found a bench in the sunshine, and gave ourselves over to the pleasures of banana splits and watching a sky splashed with diamonds as brilliantly hued as the colours in Taylor’s first paint box. All in all, it was a four-star afternoon, and by the time I dropped the kids off at Jess’s house I knew that, as difficult as it was going to be to tell Jill what I’d learned in the last forty-eight hours, I was ready to talk.

The problem was that Jill wasn’t there to listen. My nerves were taut as I watched the passengers from the Toronto flight file into the reception area at the airport. A lot of travellers got off the plane, but I didn’t spot Jill. My first thought was that, because she wasn’t expecting me to pick her up, I’d simply missed her. I went over to the luggage carousel and watched as passengers grabbed their bags and headed for home. When the last bag was taken, I watched the carousel make its final revolution, then I went to the bank of phones by the doorway, dialled Nationtv, and asked for Rapti Lustig.

Rapti sounded tense, too, but it was only an hour and a half to airtime, so I wasn’t surprised.

“I know you’ve got a million things to do,” I said, “so I won’t keep you, but I’m at the airport. I thought you said Jill was coming in from Toronto this afternoon. Did I get my wires crossed?”

There was a three-beat pause, then Rapti said, “Somebody’s got their wires crossed. Jill called this morning to tell me
I’d have to produce the show tonight because she was delayed. We talked for ages, trying to cover all the bases. As soon as I hung up, I realized I’d forgotten to ask her what she wanted to go with as a lead-in. I tried the hotel we all use when we’re in Toronto, but she wasn’t registered. Then I called our Toronto office. They didn’t know anything about it, Jo. As far as they knew, Jill hadn’t been in the city at all this week.”