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
