Murder At The Mendel (25 page)

I almost walked away, but then I thought of Sally and Des and Izaak and Clea and the Righteous Protester –debts waiting to be discharged. I reached out and turned the doorknob.

Stu was lying face down on the floor. Nina spun around when she heard me. The gun was still in her hand.

“Oh, thank God, Jo, it was terrible, he pulled the gun. You were right, it was Stuart all along.”

I was crying. I couldn’t recognize my voice. “No, Nina, not Stuart. It wasn’t Stuart. And it wasn’t Izaak and it wasn’t Des. It was you, Nina. It was you. I loved you, and it was you. All these years. It was you.”

I looked at her and I saw that imperceptibly she had raised the gun. It was pointed at me now.

“It had to be done, Jo.” She shook her head in a gesture of impatience I’d seen a thousand times. “Jo, I had to … Sometimes people have to act. Otherwise lives would just go off course.” She moved closer. The gun was still pointed at me. “I wish you hadn’t stopped being loyal, Jo.” She raised the gun.

In that pleasant cottagey room, there was the scent of Joy, and other smells, not flowery, not pleasant: the smells of death and of fear. The smell of death was Stuart’s, but the fear was mine.

Suddenly, behind me, there was a small voice. Clear and clearly frightened.

“Are you going to kill us all, Nina?” Taylor asked.

Nina shifted her gaze for a moment, and I moved toward her and smashed at her hand. She looked quickly at me, astounded, as if the ground had suddenly opened beneath her feet.

The gun was still in her hand, but it was pointed toward the floor now. Nina couldn’t seem to take her eyes from Taylor’s face. She began backing away from her granddaughter, past Stuart into the living room. Finally, when her back was against the big plate-glass window that looked out on the woods, she stopped. On the other side of the window the aspens shivered in the pink-gold light of the dropping sun.

There were no last words. Nina looked quickly at me, then at Taylor. Then she turned to face the aspens and raised the gun to her temple – the barrel touched her temple at just the point where the dark curve of her hair hit the flawless plane of her cheek. Yin and yang.

I didn’t go to her. I turned and put my arm around Taylor’s shoulder, and after forty-seven years I walked out on Nina Love. By the time Taylor and I got to the dock, the sun was low, and the ice glowed with the cool colours of a northern winter: white, purple, blue, grey. But across the lake, in the west, the sky was the most incredible shade of pink.

I pointed to it as we got into the car. “Your favourite colour,” I said.

“Not any more,” she said.

In that moment, there was an inflection in Taylor’s voice that sounded just like her mother’s. We looked at each other and then, without another word, we drove across the fragile ice to the safety of the shore.

CHAPTER

14

Taylor is with us now. She came home with me that night and she never left. There was, in fact, nowhere else for her to go. Stuart and Sally were both only children. Stu had an old aunt in a nursing home somewhere in Ontario, but Sally had no one. Nina had seen to that.

The morning after she came, Taylor and I walked over to the campus together. It was a pretty day, and we bought hot chocolate from a machine and took it outside so we could watch the squirrels. I told her that our family wanted her to live with us, and we wondered how she felt. For a while she didn’t say anything. Then she looked at me.

“Is it taken care of?” she asked.

“It can be,” I said.

“Good,” she said and that was the end of it. She hasn’t brought up the subject since. My old friend Ali Sutherland, who’s a psychiatrist, flew in from Winnipeg to talk to her. She said Taylor is doing as well as any child could after what Ali called “an appalling and crushing series of traumas.” Indeed. What Taylor needs, says Ali, is counselling, reassurance and routine – constant reinforcement of the knowledge
that everything in her new home is fixed and permanent. “Forever,” Ali had added for emphasis.

And so we do our best. So far, our best seems to be good enough. Taylor is beginning to trust us. The rest will, I hope, come later.

The final murder investigation was swift and decisive, and that helped. I didn’t have to produce the tape of Stuart and Nina, and that helped, too. The day after I got back from Stay Away Lake, the police discovered a tape that made mine irrelevant. This tape had been in the video camera above the bridal bed at the gallery, and it showed Nina killing Clea Poole. “Murder as performance art,” Hugh Rankin-Carter said when he called to see how I was taking this latest blow. I was glad they found the tape. I didn’t want there to be any doubts.

Now there weren’t.

This final unassailable proof of Nina’s guilt was discovered under circumstances that make me believe in cosmic justice or at least in cosmic jokes. When the police searched Izaak Levin’s house, they found a key stuck to the back of the self-portrait Sally had painted for Izaak when she was fourteen. The key was to a safety-deposit box Izaak had rented under the name Desmond Love. The tape was there, and with it was a long and incoherent letter addressed to Sally. When the police sorted through all the justifications and mea culpas, the history of the tape and the role it played in Sally’s death became clear.

The night Clea Poole was murdered, Izaak Levin went to the gallery to check on the installation Clea was working on. The young woman who had created the piece was a talented conceptual artist whom Izaak was thinking of taking on as a client. He had told several people at the gallery that the installation had to be executed perfectly and that he was concerned that Clea Poole was too sick to do the job right.

When he arrived, Clea was dead and the video camera was whirring away above the bed. Sally had made no secret about the disintegration of her relationship with Clea, and Izaak had assumed Sally was the murderer. To protect the woman he had loved for thirty years, he ripped the tape out and took it home for safekeeping. If he hadn’t given in to his curiosity, Sally might have lived. But when Izaak looked at the tape, two things came together for him: his own financial need and the knowledge that he had hard proof Nina Love was guilty of murder. The blackmail began, and the chain of circumstances that ended in Sally’s death and his own was set in motion.

Izaak had to die. He threatened not only Nina’s freedom but also the family life she had so carefully crafted after she came to Saskatoon. As long as he lived, Nina’s happiness hung by a thread. But Izaak Levin wasn’t the only threat.

Nina had always seen Sally as her rival: first with Desmond Love, then with Stuart Lachlan and Taylor. As Sally’s plans for taking her daughter with her to Vancouver took shape, Nina’s plan to kill Sally took shape. It was Anya the photographer who showed how the murder was done. When the proofs on the contact sheet were enlarged, the police saw what Anya had seen: Sally’s evening bag slung over the back of her chair seconds before Nina passed by but missing after she left. After Nina went to the cloakroom and slipped Sally’s bag with the epinephrine into the pocket of Izaak Levin’s coat, she came back to the table and put the powdered almonds on Sally’s dessert. Izaak was so drunk it would have been easy for her to slip the empty bag into his pocket.

Nina never had to put the next part of her plan into effect. She never had to kill Izaak Levin. He died all on his own. It was the one lucky break she had. But Nina Love had never relied on luck. When the police opened the locked door of her room in the Lachlan house, they found enough
prescription drugs to kill ten men. All the drugs were perfectly legal, the kind of medications a charming woman with a flair for acting could get a doctor to prescribe for her. The kind of drugs that could easily and fatally be slipped into a shot of whisky and offered to a drunk in a state of shock.

We’ll never know, but as Mary Ross McCourt said, the one thing we know for certain is that Nina Love would not have allowed Izaak Levin to leave the Mendel Gallery alive that night. And so it’s over.

Hilda McCourt came by today with a brochure for Shakespeare on the Saskatchewan. This summer they’ll be doing
Twelfth Night
, and Hilda wants to take the kids. When she was leaving she looked into the living room. Angus was putting the finishing touches on a diorama for his biology project, and Taylor was drawing the morpheus butterfly that’s going to be the star of the show.

For a moment, Hilda watched them without comment, then she touched my arm.

“I used to tell my students that at the end of a satisfying piece of fiction there is always something lost but there’s also something gained. Try not to lose sight of that, Joanne.”

I watched as Hilda got into her old Austin Healey and drove off. What I have lost still overwhelms me: Izaak, Stuart, Sally, Nina. Me. Or at least that part of me that believed the magic of life could be found in Nina and her world of eyelet dresses and dappled sunlight on the tea table and mist hanging heavy on the lake. All of this is gone, and much of it is, I know, past recovery.

But as I stand here on this, the first day of spring, watching my new daughter transform the blank page of an ordinary school notebook into the electric-blue flash of an Amazon butterfly, I repeat Hilda’s words like a mantra. Something was lost, but something was gained. Something was lost but something was gained.