bad,” she said. “How much did you pay?”
“Twenty-five dollars.”
Bebe made a hissing sound through her teeth: whether it was a hiss of approval or opprobrium was impossible to tell. “Better you than me,” she said finally. “Let’s visit with Kyle for a bit, then you and I can talk business.”
Kyle passed around the cookies and mixed the chocolate milk with exquisite care. When he handed Bebe hers, she turned up her nose. “You know I like a double.”
He picked up the plastic cow obligingly and poured syrup into Bebe’s milk until she held up a palm to indicate that he could stop.
“That’s more like it,” she said, then she raised her glass. “To justice,” she said.
“That’s a surprising toast coming from you,” I said. “Has something happened?”
“You bet your sweet bippy something’s happened. The cops have finally figured out our boy couldna done it. Proving once again that, as soon as you put a blue uniform on a person, they have a harder time adding two plus two than a normal person does. But I’m getting off track. The point is the cops finally found themselves the truck driver who gave Kyle the wrong directions. Of course, Kyle told them about this lady driver on day one, but they didn’t exactly bust their humps looking for her. Anyway, on the morning in question, this lady truck driver was dumping off a load of wiring in the sub-basement – no connection with what Kyle was doing, so of course no one pursued her. Kyle asked this driver where he should go to fix the air conditioning, and she got turned around and pointed him towards the room where, unbeknownst to her or Kyle, that girl Ariel was already dead.” Thrilled by the vagaries of fate, Bebe Morrissey rocked back and forth in her chair. “The one lucky thing for Kyle was that the truck driver was a lady.”
“Why was that lucky?” I said.
Bebe rolled her eyes. “Because there’s never been a woman born who, once they saw Kyle, forgot him.”
Bebe’s great-grandson lowered his head in embarrassment.
I turned to him. “You must be so relieved,” I said. “These last days must have been a nightmare.”
Kyle furrowed his brow. “Ronnie always says you have to take the crunchy with the smooth, and it’s been crunchy. All the same, I’m not mad at anybody. Not even the police. I know why they thought it was me. Ariel was so pretty and so smart. They couldn’t believe she’d want to be my friend.”
“She was a good person,” I said.
“Whoever killed her didn’t mean to.” Kyle’s voice rang with conviction. “They just loved her so much they made a mistake.”
Bebe gave him a thin smile. “Go watch TV,” she said. “The Jays are playing, and you like them. Come back in ten minutes and get our snack dishes. If you don’t wash the glasses quick enough, all that chocolate gunk sticks to the bottoms.”
As soon as Kyle was out of earshot, Bebe shook her head. “A nice boy, but dumb enough to be a cop. He’s moved back here now.”
“Ronnie told me,” I said.
“It’s for the best,” Bebe said. “He’s got a short fuse, and until they capture the real murderer, people are going to be giving him the evil eye.” Her head darted like an old tortoise’s. “Which leads me to my next point. Did you talk to that African prince?”
“Yes,” I said. “We had a long talk this morning.”
Her eyes danced with expectancy. “So – could he have done it?”
I thought of the man who had felt ten feet tall and bulletproof from the moment Ariel asked him to help her have a child. “Not in a thousand years,” I said.
“Case closed on him?”
I nodded.
“Good. Not often you see a real man any more. It would be a shame to have to turn him in. How about the one with the face?”
“He’s… out of town.”
Bebe’s radar registered my hesitation. “That’s not the same as ‘case closed,’ is it?”
“No,” I said, “it isn’t.”
“Then keep your ears open.” She flicked her tongue over her upper lip and captured a drop of chocolate that had caught on a whisker. “I’ve got another potato to throw in the pot,” she said. “What do you know about the girl’s mother?”
“Molly Warren? She’s my gynecologist. She’s phenomenal.”
“Maybe not so phenomenal,” Bebe said mockingly. “She came to visit the girl a few times. They only quarrelled the once in my hearing, but it was the kind of spat that left questions in my head.”
“Questions about what?”
“About parents and kids and where you draw the line.” Bebe’s tone had grown sombre.
“How many kids do you have, Bebe?”
“I had three – all dead now. What I’ve got left is Ronnie, who was my youngest’s youngest, and Kyle, who is my one and only great-grandchild. I’ve had disappointments in my life. Don’t kid yourself about that. All the same, I never woulda spoke to one of mine the way that doctor of yours spoke to her girl.”
“What did Molly say?”
“All I heard was a snippet. They were squabbling about something the daughter wanted to do. I don’t remember what it was, but finally the girl said, ‘I have to do what I think is best. I only have one life.’ Then the mother said, ‘You’re wrong. You have two lives, because I gave you mine.’ ”
“When was this?” I asked.
“Not long ago,” Bebe said. “Coupla weeks, maybe three. But the when isn’t as important as the what. In my opinion, that’s a helluva thing to say to your own flesh and blood. I never got all the way through grade eight, so maybe I’m not one to judge. But if I was you, I’d be asking myself whether I might’ve been wrong in thinking my friend, the gyn-e-col-o-gist, was such hot stuff.”
By 5:30 the next morning, Bebe’s words were still roiling in my mind. Maybe that’s why I ended up having a double martini for breakfast, or maybe it was just that, on that particular day, gin seemed as reasonable a way to cope with the vagaries of human existence as any other.
On the day of Ariel’s burial, the fanfare prelude to the AccuWeather forecast catapulted my body into full flight-or-fight mode, but I was neither a fighter nor a flyer. I was a fifty-two-year-old woman trembling with the hope that climatologist Tara Lavallee’s forecast for the day ahead would be shot through with Old Testament pyrotechnics: skies riven with lightning, torrential winds, bushes exploding into flames. Anything to make travel impossible. But Tara’s chirp was lively, and the weather she predicted was picture-perfect, province-wide.
I reached down and stroked Willie. “No exit,” I said, but Bouviers aren’t hard-wired for existential gloom. When I swung my legs out of bed, Willie’s hind end shimmied with joy. As we had every morning of our life together, we were going for a run around the lake. It was the highlight of Willie’s day, but that morning the run was for me. I was counting on exercise to dull the edge of the axe that was pounding at my nerve ends.
It didn’t work. Neither did the long, hot shower or the series of deep inhalations of Lavender Breeze scented oil that Angus had given me for Mother’s Day with the suggestion that aromatherapy might help me chill out.
Molly Warren had been adamant about not wanting us to wear anything “funereal” for the trip to Lac La Ronge. She said Ariel had loved the cottage, and it would be good for us to spend at least part of the day exploring the island’s rough terrain. As I pulled on my bluejeans, a turtleneck, and my favourite fleece jacket, I tried to banish fear by imagining the species of wildflowers that might cover the island at this time of year, but I was beyond help. Visualization may make it possible for a tight end to win a Super Bowl ring, but it didn’t work for me. The knot of terror in my stomach as I started downstairs in search of something to eat was the size of a bowling ball.
From my pregnancies I had learned that even the queasiest stomach can tolerate soda crackers. I found half a box of saltines in the cupboard and opened the refrigerator in search of something with which to wash them down. When I shook the orange-juice carton and discovered it was empty, my fate was sealed. The bright blue bottle of Bombay gin jumped into my hand.
Remembering the sense of well-being that had enveloped me in Druthers when the first sip of gin and
