made me wonder about the power of telepathy.
Howard’s rumbling bass was falsely casual. “So did you find out anything?”
“I found out plenty,” I said, “starting with the fact that Charlie and Ariel knew Kyle Morrissey. Until Christmas, Kyle was their neighbour, which makes it highly unlikely that you needed me to find out about him. Damn it, Howard, if you had told me you wanted me to check the water for alligators, I would have done it gladly, but I don’t like being lied to.”
Howard’s exasperation was apparent. “Put yourself in my place, Jo. What was I supposed to do, ask my oldest friend in the world to find out whether there was evidence suggesting my son killed the woman he loved? Use your head.”
“I did use my head. I followed the leads I had. I asked the right questions. And right now, I wish I could just push the delete key and send everything I’ve learned into the ether.”
“It’s that bad?”
“It may be,” I said. “And Howard, anything I have, the police will have soon – if they don’t have it already.”
“What have you got?”
There was no way to spare him. “Ariel was pregnant when she died,” I said.
There was silence, then Howard spoke two words, filled with grief and wonder. “A grandchild.”
“No,” I said. “Charlie wasn’t the father.”
“How the hell did you find that out?”
“Ariel told Mieka.”
“What else?”
“Ariel and Charlie weren’t together when she died. She’d left him two weeks earlier. The old lady next door saw Ariel leave the house with another man. Apparently, Charlie followed them out of the house and begged Ariel to come back.”
“Shit.”
“There’s more,” I said. “Alex’s nephew, Eli, is a big fan of Charlie’s. He tapes ‘Heroes’ every day. He wanted me to listen to some of the shows Charlie’s done lately.”
“And…?”
“They’re devastating. You have to get Charlie to come back to Regina. I was talking to Alex tonight: he says Detective Hallam has a lot of questions, and it would be better for Charlie if he came back voluntarily to answer them.”
“It’s not that simple. Charlie’s really fucked up, Jo. He blames himself for Ariel’s death.”
“Does he have reason to blame himself?”
In a move I’d seen often during the political days, Howard deflected the question. “I’ve had my arguments with the Church, Jo, but the Pope is right about one thing. Hell is a state of mind. From the moment Charlie found out that Ariel was dead, he’s been in hell, and he’s taken me on a few little side trips with him.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re not going to like this,” he said grimly. “After his show was over that day you and I went to CVOX, Charlie asked me to take him down to the morgue to see Ariel.”
“And you did?”
“I know it was crazy, but Charlie said he had to see her. I tried to talk him out of it, but he wasn’t hearing me.” Howard’s voice grew low with embarrassment and pity. “He said he had to hold her in his arms one last time.”
“Oh, Howard, no.”
“I pulled some strings. Got him in. It was a big mistake, Jo. He wouldn’t leave her. I had to get an orderly to help me drag him away. When we left the room he was still reaching out to her…”
An image flashed in my mind, but it wasn’t of Charlie being wrenched from his beloved under the pitiless lights of a hospital morgue; it was of the lithograph that had hung in my grandfather’s study. Beneath the picture of Orpheus and Eurydice were the words “Stretching out their arms to embrace each other, they grasped only the air.” When I was a child, those words had seemed to me the absolute incarnation of loss. Fifty years later, they still did.
“Jo, are you there?” Howard’s nervousness was apparent.
“Yes,” I said. “But I still think you should have stopped Charlie from leaving town.”
“Christ, Jo. You’re not usually obtuse. His girlfriend’s been murdered, and everything my son says makes him sound guilty. When we were at the morgue, he kept apologizing to Ariel, saying it was his fault she was dead. I was watching the orderly’s face. He was about ten seconds away from calling the cops. All I could think of was getting Charlie someplace where nobody could hear him. When he said he wanted to see Marnie, I jumped at the chance.”
“How is he now?”
“When he’s with Marnie, he’s fine. We haven’t told her about Ariel, so when Charlie talks to her, it’s as if Ariel’s just waiting at home for him. Charlie talks about their house and that Rottweiler they have. It’s almost like he escapes when he talks to his mother. Marnie’s in a world where reality’s a little shaky, and that’s where he wants to be.”
“He may want to be there, Howard, but he can’t stay there. You have to bring him back.”
The silence between us was eloquent. “I know,” he said finally. “I’ll take care of it. Meanwhile, I need another favour.”
“What?”
“Talk to Marnie. Charlie’s friend Liam Hill called yesterday. He told her that story you’d passed along about that night at Little Flower when she shoved the cabbage rolls at me. Marnie loved it. I’ve been trying to think of some more political stories, but I can’t remember any that she’s in.”
“I guess that says something right there, doesn’t it?” I said tightly.
“Jo, if you want to tear a strip off me, you’ll have to wait for another day. At the moment, there’s not much left to tear. Have you got any stories with Marnie in them?”
“Sure,” I said. “Put her on.”
At first, the sound on the other end of the line was like a gargle. I shrunk from imagining the person from whom it came. When I’d visited her in the hospital in Toronto the weekend after her accident, Marnie had looked so much like the Marnie I had always known that I was certain she’d break free of all the tubes, rip off her ridiculous surgical turban, and we’d escape to the nearest bar and talk about our three favourite topics: kids, politics, and what we were going to do with the rest of our lives. But when I’d looked into her eyes, it was clear that the surgical headdress wasn’t a temporary accessory to be abandoned when real life returned. Like the wimple or the purdah, Marnie’s sterile turban was emblematic of the fact that the life of the woman behind it had changed forever.
I had sat by Marnie’s bedside, held her hand, and chatted. There was never any response. When Sunday came and I kissed Marnie’s forehead, left the pain and the stench of antiseptic behind me and boarded the bus that took me to the airport, I felt the lung-bursting exhilaration of a prisoner headed for freedom. It was not a memory I was proud of, but it was the truth, and that night as I heard Marnie’s voice on the other end of the line, guilt washed over me. I hadn’t called her and, except for a card on her birthday, I hadn’t written. Sins of omission. But I was being given a chance at redemption.
“Howard tells me you guys have been telling war stories,” I said. “I was just thinking of a couple myself. Remember that time you and I were campaigning down in Thunder Creek, and we went to that trailer on Highway 2?”
“Gloves.” Marnie’s slurred enunciation stretched the single word painfully, but her delight was obvious.
“Right,” I said. “That woman who answered the door naked as a jaybird except for her yellow rubber gloves. They came up to her elbows, but it was the only part of her that was covered, and there we were trying to find a safe place to look and you said…”
“Bad time.” Marnie’s voice had been music, but now her cadences were distorted like an old record played at the wrong speed.
“Right. You said, ‘We’ll come back. We’ve obviously come at a bad time.’ And she said, ‘What makes you think it’s a bad time?’ ”
