The Last Good Day (16 page)

Zack was awake when I came back. “Were you just going to disappear without saying goodbye?”

“I was going to let you sleep,” I said.

“I don’t want to sleep,” he said. “Come here.”

I sat on the bed beside him, and he drew me to him. When he started to kiss me, I turned my head. “I didn’t bring my toothbrush.”

“Use mine.”

“I couldn’t do that.”

Zack looked amused. “We just spent several hours exchanging bodily fluids,” he said.

“That was different.”

“You’re a woman of contradictions, Ms. Kilbourn, but I’ll learn to live with them.” He stroked my head. “So what are you going to do today?”

“I’ll probably try to figure out what happened here tonight.”

“Regrets?”

“None. At this moment, I’m very happy.”

“Me too.”

“And what are
you
going to do today?”

“I have to be in court by nine o’clock.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No. I’m a lawyer. Appearing in court is part of the gig.”

“Are you prepared?”

“Always.” Zack pushed himself up so he was sitting. “Anything you want me to bring you from town?”

I kissed his forehead. “A toothbrush,” I said.

CHAPTER

11

When I awoke for the second time that morning, my son was peering anxiously at me.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“I’m fine,” I said. “What time is it?”

“Seven o’clock,” Angus said. “You slept in.”

“But I woke up, so you can stop worrying.”

Angus was not reassured. “You always get up at five-thirty. Taylor said you were throwing the disc around last night. I thought you might have pulled something.”

I sat up and stretched. “Everything’s functioning,” I said.

But my son’s attention had wandered. Face down on the bed beside me was Harriet Hynd’s copy of
To the Lighthouse
. The light bulb over Angus’s head flashed on. “You were
reading,”
he announced triumphantly. “You stayed up late
reading
. That’s why you slept in.” Once again the universe was unfolding as it should. He gave my leg a patronizing pat. “Gotta get you a real life, Mum,” he said.

“I’ll work on it,” I said.

After Angus left, I showered, dressed, and realizing I couldn’t live on the afterglow of passion alone, headed for the kitchen. Taylor was at the breakfast table, drizzling honey on her toast. Her hair was smoothed into a smart French braid.

I touched her hair. “When did you learn to do this by yourself?”

“Rose taught me last week. She says the fewer things you have to rely on other people to do for you, the better off you are.”

“She’s right about that.” I peeled an orange and sat down opposite my daughter. “So what’s on the agenda today?”

“This morning we’re hauling rocks,” she said. “We’re going to build the Inukshuk out by the gazebo.”

“That’s quite a distance,” I said. “Want me to put the rocks in the trunk of the Volvo and drive them out there for you?”

“No, that’s okay. We’ll use the wheelbarrow. We kind of want to do this ourselves.” As she always did, Taylor cut her toast into the smallest of triangles. “I’m supposed to ask you if it’s okay if I go to Standing Buffalo later on. Rose wants to take her sister some lunch.”

“Fine with me,” I said. “How’s Betty doing?”

“She’s bored.
I’d
be bored if I had to sit around for six weeks with my leg in a cast.”

“Maybe I’ll come with you and visit.”

“That’d be good,” Taylor said. “But if Gracie’s mum comes back, we have to stay here so she won’t think we’re mad.”

“Why would she think you were mad?”

Taylor wolfed a dainty triangle. “I don’t know,” she said. “Gracie knows, but she won’t talk about it.”

I poured cereal into my bowl and went to the fridge to get the milk. The carton was suspiciously light. I opened it and held it over my bowl. Three drops of milk dribbled out.

Taylor and I exchanged glances. “Angus!” we said in unison.

I selected a banana. “A fruitarian’s breakfast for me,” I said. “But I might as well walk down to the Point Store and get a litre of milk. Want to come?”

Taylor shook her head. “I’m already late. We want to get the Inukshuk finished today.”

“Okay,” I said. “Don’t forget to check in.”

I picked up my purse and started for the door, but the mention of Lily Falconer had taken the bounce out of my step. I had no proof that Lily and Alex had been together during the days when they had both been
AWOL
, but logic suggested it was a strong possibility. If Lily was coming back, it was possible that Alex was coming back too. Our relationship was over, but the prospect of Alex losing the career he’d spent half his life building sickened me. When I picked up the phone and dialled Robert Hallam’s number I was searching for reassurance that somehow the confusion and questions Alex had left behind had been cleared away.

Robert Hallam offered no comfort. He was pleasant but guarded when he heard my voice. We inquired after one another’s families and then I asked if he’d had news of Alex.

I could feel the ice. “I can’t talk about Inspector Kequahtooway, Joanne. It’s an internal matter now.”

“So Alex
is
being investigated.”

Robert was edgy. “Joanne …”

“I know,” I said. “It’s an internal matter.”

He sighed. “Rosalie and I still consider you a friend. I just can’t discuss this.”

“I understand,” I said. “But Robert, is Alex all right?”

There was a silence. “I can’t discuss it. Goodbye, Joanne.” He cleared his throat. “Our door is always open to you.”

As I walked to the Point Store, the realization hit me that, in the vernacular of another era, there was more than one way to skin a cat. Robert Hallam wasn’t the only source of information available to me. I passed the store and went straight to Coffee Row. Three of the gents were already holding court and Endzone, flopped on the rug at her master’s feet, was dreaming her old-dog dreams. The gentlemen raised their caps to me, but instead of continuing to my place at the next table, I joined them. The shock was seismic.

Morris took command. “You’ve sat in the wrong place,” he said, turning up the volume the way he would for someone who didn’t understand the language. He pointed to the picnic table under the tree. “That’s your place over there.”

“I want to sit with you today,” I said.

Aubrey, the gnome with the dental-drill whine, leaped to his feet. “This is the men’s table. We smoke. We use strong language. We talk about things you’d have no interest in.”

Endzone, ripped from sleep by the ruckus, ambled over, sniffed me curiously, and fixed me with a baleful eye.

“It’s all right,” I said, stroking her jowls, “I’m just visiting.” Mollified, she rested her chin on my knee and awaited developments.

I turned my attention to the men.

“I need some information,” I said. “And I think you can help me. Once when I was having coffee here, I overheard you talking about Lily Falconer.”

Aubrey sat back down and the trio exchanged glances.

“I’m not asking you to gossip,” I said. “I just want you to tell me about Lily Falconer. That day you mentioned something about a tragedy involving her mother.”

“Goddamn that daughter of mine,” Morris thundered. “You could have read everything you needed to know if that girl had left my archives alone, but oh no, she thought they were a fire hazard. She gave me a choice – say goodbye to my Player’s Plains or say goodbye to my archives. What the hell kind of choice is that for a daughter to give her father?”

Lear couldn’t have been more cogent. It was a freighted question, and I waited for Morris to move on. It didn’t take him long.

Tapping his temple with a forefinger brown as a cured tobacco leaf, Morris grew discursive. “My archives may be gone, but I still have my mind. I can tell you what happened, in my own words. It’ll be – what do they call it, Stan?”

“Oral history,” Stan said.

“Which is good,” Morris said. “Except you lack the pictures.”

“She can still see the damn pictures,” Stan Gardiner said. “The newspaper has its own archives, Morris, and they don’t use theirs to paper-train puppies. Mrs. Kilbourn can walk into the offices of the
Valley Gazette
and ask them to let her look at everything they’ve got on Gloria Ryder.”

“Gloria Ryder,” I repeated. “That was Lily’s mother’s name?”

“Yes,” Stan said. “The date you’ll be wanting is January 1968, and after you’ve gone through the paper’s archives, come talk to me. It’s only right that you get the full story.”

In the months after I’d decided to rent the cottage at Lawyers’ Bay, I subscribed to the
Valley Gazette
. It was a weekly that was clear in its purpose: to record the births, marriages, deaths, celebrations, follies, and accomplishments of its citizens and to keep a wary eye on governments, developers, and special-interest groups that might threaten the fine lives of the people of Fort Qu’Appelle and district.

The building that housed the paper was as solid and neighbourly as the
Gazette
itself. The brass plate that announced the paper’s name was polished to a fine sheen and the red geraniums in the window bloomed with health. There was a bell on the counter that separated what was obviously the business part of the newspaper from the reception area, and when I rang it a very thin young man, wearing a jacket and tie, bluejeans, and John Lennon glasses came out to greet me. He didn’t look much older than Angus.

“I’m doing some research,” I said. “I wonder if I could look at your newspaper’s coverage of a case involving a woman named Gloria Ryder. The events happened in January 1968.”

“No problem,” he said, and apparently it wasn’t. He was back with the file within fifteen seconds.

“That was snappy,” I said.

“You’re not the first person to ask for that information today,” he said.

“May I ask who else was interested?”

“The media are ever vigilant,” he said, and his smile was impish. “Take as much time as you need. Ring when you’re finished.”

The reception room was a pleasant place to read: quiet, with sunshine filtering through the brilliant red petals and deep-green foliage of the geraniums. That said, the story in which Gloria Ryder unwillingly played the central role was grim, a tale of obsessive love that ended in the tragedy of a grisly murder-suicide.

Gloria was married to John Ryder who, like her, was a Dakota from Standing Buffalo. The newspaper described them as good people: hard-working, churchgoing, devoted to their only child, eight-year-old Lily. John was a mechanic and Gloria was a nurse at the Indian hospital in Fort Qu’Appelle. The problem started when a middle-aged white doctor at the hospital became infatuated with Gloria. The year was 1967. Indian women had had the vote for less than five years, and Gloria understood her position in the scheme of things. She needed her job, and she knew that in a case of he said–she said, she would be the loser. Afterward, she explained that she had done everything in her power to rebuff her unwelcome suitor, but that she hadn’t wanted to risk telling either her husband or her employers. The doctor never made any physical advances towards Gloria. He was convinced that his destiny was to take Gloria from the life she knew and, as he put it, raise her up. One bitterly cold night in mid-January, Gloria’s unwillingness to be raised up drove the good doctor to Standing Buffalo, where he shot John Ryder, who was sitting in his living room reading a
Maclean’s
magazine. Then, apparently moved to pity by the presence of the daughter of the woman he sought to save, he turned the gun not on Gloria but on himself.

Thirty-seven years later, the soft pages of the
Valley Gazette
were still heavy with the tragedy of the event and the dark spoor of anger and recriminations that followed in its wake. The text of the stories was heartbreaking, but it was the anguish in the yellowed photographs of two people that stayed with me. The first pictures were of the woman at the centre of the tragedy. Gloria Ryder’s face was stamped with the ancient misery of women whose lives have been devastated by forces beyond their control. It was also – unmistakably – the face of the woman whose likeness had been carved into the figure at the base of the gazebo. The second pictures were of Lily as a child. The photographer had caught her several times on the windswept, frozen playground of the residential school in Lebret. She looked dazed and frail, but she was never alone. A tall boy of perhaps twelve was always with her, his arm raised impotently as he tried to shield Lily from the camera’s invasive eye. The boy was Alex Kequahtooway.

I took the file containing the stories to the counter and rang the bell. The young man in the John Lennon glasses appeared quickly.

“Hard to believe something like that could happen in a place like this, isn’t it?” he said.

“Hard to believe it could happen anywhere,” I said.

As I drove back to Lawyers’ Bay, ideas swirled through my mind like the shifting shapes in a kaleidoscope. The question of whether Alex was Lily’s lover was still unanswered, but there was no doubt that he had been her protector. When he stood at the window of the Hynd cottage and said, “Maybe we all would have been better off just staying where we were,” his bitterness had not been directed at me. It had welled up from a source I never knew existed.

It seemed that the connection between Alex and Lily Ryder had never been severed. But if that was true, there were more questions. Why had Alex never told me about Lily? If she were simply a girl he had once known, why had he never mentioned her name and her tragedy? Other questions nagged. During the years when I believed Alex and I were as close as a man and a woman could be, what other secrets had he held back? What else hadn’t he told me?

It was almost eleven when I pulled onto the shoulder of the road beside the Point Store and walked to the entrance. Angus was outside watering flats of annuals that had seen better days and were now being offered at seriously reduced prices.

“What’s going on?” Angus said. “After you left, Mr. Gardiner came into the store and told me the moment you came I was supposed to tell you he was waiting. Then he went upstairs.” Angus frowned. “I haven’t screwed up, have I?”

I leaned over and picked a faded bloom from a wilting impatiens. “You’re in the clear,” I said. “This has nothing to do with you.”

I could hear the strains of an accordion playing “White Christmas” as soon as I reached the landing at the top of the stairs. I tapped at the door and Stan greeted me. He was wearing a cardigan and slippers, master of his household. He motioned me inside. The living room was furnished with the essentials: a La-Z-Boy, a coffee table, a
VCR
, and a
TV
set on which Lawrence Welk was presenting his Christmas special. Stan turned the sound down but not off, walked into the next room, and returned with a chrome kitchen chair.

“Make yourself comfortable,” he said, pointing to the La-Z-Boy.

I sank in, and Stan perched.

“So you read the articles?” he said.

“Yes,” I said. “It was a terrible thing – for everyone.”

“For her especially,” Stan said.

“Lily?”

“I was thinking of the mother.”