Beautiful Lie the Dead (29 page)

After pressing send, he picked up his empty Scotch glass and headed downstairs to the kitchen. He wasn't hungry, but he knew he had to eat if he wanted to preserve his strength. He'd had nothing since he'd forced down half a croissant and coffee with the reporter.

He still bristled when he thought how little information he'd managed to pry out of the cunning old bastard. He'd told Hatfield everything—about Lise Gravelle being run over by a snowplow near his house, about the flowers on his father's grave, even about the fairytale his mother had invented about his father all these years. Hatfield had listened without taking a note and pretended to confide important details that were in fact just a rehash of old newspaper reports. He'd pretended to be as baffled as Brandon about the mysterious graveside visitor and agreed that it could well have been Meredith, but Brandon had seen the crafty gleam in his eyes. What did he know, and what was he planning next?

He had the guy's card with his cell phone number, which he'd given to encourage Brandon to keep him informed, but that cut both ways. Brandon intended to keep close tabs on what the man was up to, and what he found out. Everyone was keeping secrets from him—Cam Hatfield, his Aunt Bea, Uncle Cyril, and most of all his mother. How did all the secrets connect to Lise Gravelle, who had ended up dead just blocks from their home? And to Meredith, who had disappeared on the very same night. His breath quickened with fear.

He poured a second Scotch. As he stood at the kitchen counter with his runaway thoughts, he heard a rumbling sound. He glanced out the window just as his mother's BMW slipped past him into the garage behind the house. He watched as she climbed out and stood studying his car. She walked around the front of it, wiped some salt stains off the front bumper, then strode purposefully towards the house. He steeled himself. That second Scotch had been a mistake.

He stayed where he was and listened as she opened the door, unzipped her boots and hung her coat on the hall rack. He heard a faint gasp and a whispered “Damn!” He wondered what had rattled her, but when she appeared in the kitchen archway, she had a smile pasted on her face.

“Darling! I'm so glad you're home.”

He remained rigid in her embrace. She drew back, her eyes searching his, and for the first time he saw her as a stranger, tired, bruised and middle-aged. Her eyes, already haggard, darkened further at the accusation she must have seen in his. She pulled away and turned to the Scotch bottle still open on the counter.

“Right. I'll have some of that.”

Once she'd poured herself a shot far healthier than his, she waved the glass towards the living room. As always it was a command, not a request, but nonetheless he followed. No point in escalating the battle before it had even begun. She sat down in the wing chair by the window that had always been hers, but now had the added benefit of casting her in shadow while his every expression would be bathed in light. He dragged the second wing chair over to the window opposite hers. A minor victory, but he needed all the advantage he could muster.

She crossed her legs and gripped her glass in her lap. “I did it for you, darling. And for your father's memory.”

“Sure.”

She paused. “All right, yes, I did it for me too. Because it was humiliating enough that the whole of Montreal knew how your father died. At first it seemed like the best foot to put forward, and then the story—”

“The lie.”

“It wasn't strictly speaking a lie.”

“Spare me the legal hair-splitting, Mom. People were paid off, who knows, maybe even threatened, to kill the story and promote this fiction. That this wonderful man, this brilliant, dedicated, overwhelmed professor had succumbed to the pressures of life.”

“He was all those things. His...his weakness didn't negate all that. But in the public's eye, in the police eye, it would have. Great men can have—”

He held up a sharp hand. He was surprised by the energy he felt. “Don't!
I'm
a man. That ‘great men's weakness' is bullshit. I don't care what the public thinks or remembers him for, I care that the father I treasured and admired for three decades was a lie. I care that for reasons I haven't fully uncovered, it may have cost me the woman that I love!”

She took a deep breath and sipped her Scotch with a rock-steady hand. Before she could regroup, he leaned forward.

“Mom, what the hell is going on! Did Meredith learn something, see something that caused her to disappear?”

“I honestly don't know, Brandon. Everything I know is thirty years old. I can't imagine why it would matter to her.”

“I went to Montreal—”

“I know you did. Cyril told me.”

A chill ran through him. “You were in Montreal too?” She nodded. “Your Aunt Bea called me to tell me you'd arrived and she was going to tell you the truth about your father.”

“What the hell were you doing? Sneaking around trying to shut everybody up?”

“No, Brandon.” She sounded calm. Patient, reassuring Mother talking to him as if he were five years old again. He felt his gut clench. “I only wanted to know what you'd been told, and to talk to Cyril before you did. But you beat me to it.”

“Why did you want to talk to Cyril?”

“Because...” She paused, studying him. He had the strangest feeling that she was re-evaluating what he knew and what lie she could safely tell him next. “Cyril was my rock when your father died. I was devastated. I know that's hard for you to believe, but I was fresh out of law school, barely twenty-five years old, a bewildered, hurt young mother with a two-month old baby.”

Brandon remembered both Cyril's and Cam Hatfield's opinion that his mother had come off far better with his father dead than alive. He hardened himself against his mother's poignant portrait. “Come off it, Mother. Cyril hasn't a tender bone in his body.”

Her eyes narrowed. “That's not true. Your father's death—and the manner of it—affected him very profoundly. He's a deeply wounded man, Brandon. He's always kept those wounds private, but in the aftermath of your father's death, he was the one family member I could count on.”

“To pay people off, to threaten the newspapers...”

“To shield me. To shield you, and yes, to shield your father's memory. I know Cyril comes across as austere and calculating, but he's an old man who's lived alone too long—”

“Jesus. Please give me some credit. He's a vindictive, controlling old bastard, and if he was nice to you when my father died, it was for his own reasons. Maybe just keeping the Longstreet name out of the shit, maybe something else.”

She drew in a quick breath. “Like what?” He reined in his anger. Once again he sensed she was holding out and wondering what he knew. He tried a bluff. “You know perfectly well. It's what you've been trying to keep from me all along.”

“I haven't been keeping anything from you!”

“Okay, let me ask you this. Did you go to Dad's grave when you were in Montreal?”

She looked blindsided. “Of course not. Why?”

“Did you know Lise Gravelle, the woman who was killed—”

“I know who you mean. I didn't know her.”

“Was she coming to see you?”

Her brow furrowed. “I have no idea, Brandon. I'd never met her, never heard of her.”

His mother was the consummate actor, used to playing with truth and obfuscation on the courtroom stage. She had mastered every emotion—disbelief, outrage, bewilderment and hurt. Her denial rang with such authenticity that he had to remind himself not to believe a word.

“Why would she come to see you?”

“I don't know that she was! I don't know the woman from Eve.”

“Who else did you see in Montreal besides Cyril?”

“A couple of old friends and cousins.” She supplied names, all relations who had had no useful information to offer Brandon during his trip.

“Did you warn them not to talk to me?”

Her lips twitched. “You missed your calling going into medicine.

You should become a lawyer.”

“Did you warn them?”

“Darling, I'm not the enemy! I knew the cat was out of the bag. I told them you were all grown up now and could handle whatever they wanted to tell you.”

He didn't believe her for a minute. “And did you say the same thing to Cameron Hatfield?”

“Who?”

“The newspaper reporter who covered Dad's story.”

She blinked, and her playful smile grew rigid. The spasm lasted only a second, but it told him all he needed to know. She hadn't spoken to Hatfield, but there was indeed more to the story that she didn't want him to know.

TWENTY-ONE

I
t was five thirty in the evening. Green had spent the first hour of his westward drive squinting into the setting sun. In the cloudless winter sky, its white rays had shattered prism-like over the horizon before mercifully slipping out of sight. By the time Green finally neared Ottawa, the evening sky had deepened to velvet blue over the countryside, but his eyes ached.

He'd phoned ahead when he was about an hour out to ask Gibbs to pick up Lise Gravelle's cousin and bring him to the station. It wasn't the most compassionate way to handle a next-of-kin interview, but he doubted this cousin, after thirty years of estrangement, would be too grief-stricken.

Gibbs had phoned back half an hour later to warn Green that Denis Gravelle spoke virtually no English, although he'd managed to convey his displeasure at the request. He was hungry, tired and in no mood for English cops. Gibbs awaited instructions.

“Tell him to get some food, and I'll meet him in the restaurant with a translator.”

Through some unknown combination of gestures, guesswork and fractured French, Gibbs and Gravelle had settled on the Ethiopian restaurant just up the street from the cheap Rideau Street hotel Gravelle had booked. Green had mulled over the wisdom of attempting the interview on his own, but decided that Marie Claire Levesque might get far more cooperation out of him. Besides being Francophone, she was a lot easier to look at than Green.

Levesque was already waiting for him when he walked into the restaurant, almost deserted on a Sunday night. The pungent smell of spices filled the room with promise and the modest decor was soft and discreet. Far from looking annoyed at the interruption of her Sunday, she was lounging back in her chair chatting with a rugged bull of a man who was grinning from ear to ear. Small wonder. Wearing only jeans and an oversized grey turtleneck, she was stunning even without make-up. As Green approached, she glanced up with a lazy smile. She gestured casually.

“Denis, this is my boss, Inspector Green.” Her tone said “boss, but don't bother about him.”

“
Bienvenue à Ottawa,
” Green said, extending his hand before continuing with the French speech he had rehearsed, all the more important now after Levesque's subversive start. “Thank you for meeting me at this difficult time. French is not always my strength, so I have asked Sergeant Levesque to join us to help if it's necessary.”

The waiter brought two bottles of beer, an Ethiopian brand for Levesque and a Molson Export for Gravelle. The waiter glanced inquiringly at Green, who pointed to Levesque's. While he shed his coat and settled in, Green surreptitiously sized up the cousin. Thickly muscled and tanned, he looked like a man who spent his days at heavy labour in the sun and his nights at the local tavern. Bristly grey hair sprouted in odd patches on his head and his face had clearly encountered too many fists. Or hockey pucks. Missing teeth, flattened nose, torn ear and a network of lumpy scars that suggested old acne. All in all, an ugly, hard-headed son of a bitch, with the expression to match. He took a deep slug of beer before scowling at Green.

“I don't know what I'm supposed to do with her,” he said, speaking so fast through his missing teeth that Green had to scramble to understand. “Hardly remember her, with her fancy clothes and her snob ways. Broke her mother's heart, never even came back for her funeral, and you want me to pay for hers?”

Green was still deciphering when the man continued. “But I'm here and I don't want to waste more goddamn time in this city that I have to. So get on with your questions.”

Green had been planning a more subtle approach, but decided to match straight talk with his own. “Why did she break with her family?”

“Her and her sister thought they were too good for us. Didn't like putting their hands in cow shit at four o'clock in the morning.”

“Just the two of them? Two sisters?”

“Yeah. There was a brother who died as a child, and her mother wasn't right in the head ever since. But don't get me wrong. My uncle adored those girls, his little princesses, and he's the one insisted they get an education. He just didn't expect them to turn their backs on him when they did.”

“Where is the sister?”

“Lilianne? Who knows?” He waved a dismissive hand into the distance. “I heard she and Lise had a falling out and she took off to Ontario with some guy. There was always some guy.” For the first time his ugly features softened at the memory. “Pretty girl. They were both pretty.”

Green leaned forward to draw him out further, only to have the waiter arrive with a huge platter of hot, spicy foods. Denis recoiled in dismay at the display, barely recognizable beyond some hard boiled eggs and chicken legs covered in yellow sauce. He groped around for a non-existent fork.

Laughing with amusement, Levesque explained that one ate with one's fingers and demonstrated by tearing off a scrap of flat bread and digging in. Denis's face collapsed in a grimace, and he pushed his chair back, signalling for another Molson's.

Green tried to recapture the mood. “It must have been hard on Lise to lose touch with her sister like that.”

Denis took another swig and eyed the food out of the corner of his eye. “Harder on her poor
maman
. After losing her son too. She had no friends. You had to drag her to family evenings, she never went out of the house. I don't know, some kind of phobia? Used to run inside the minute a car turned up the lane. When the girls left, well...” He shrugged to express his defeat. “My uncle wasn't much for words either, but I know he never forgave them.”