Burying Ariel Read online

  ACCLAIM FOR GAIL BOWEN AND

  THE JOANNE KILBOURN MYSTERIES

  “Bowen is one of those rare, magical mystery writers readers love not only for her suspense skills but for her stories’ elegance, sense of place and true-to-life form.… A master of ramping up suspense.”

  –Ottawa Citizen

  “Bowen can confidently place her series beside any other being produced in North America.”

  –Halifax Chronicle-Herald

  “Gail Bowen’s Joanne Kilbourn mysteries are small works of elegance that assume the reader of suspense is after more than blood and guts, that she is looking for the meaning behind a life lived and a life taken.”

  –Calgary Herald

  “Bowen has a hard eye for the way human ambition can take advantage of human gullibility.”

  –Publishers Weekly

  “Gail Bowen got the recipe right with her series on Joanne Kilbourn.”

  –Vancouver Sun

  “What works so well [is Bowen’s] sense of place – Regina comes to life – and her ability to inhabit the everyday life of an interesting family with wit and vigour.… Gail Bowen continues to be a fine mystery writer, with a protagonist readers can invest in for the long run.”

  –National Post

  “Gail Bowen is one of Canada’s literary treasures.”

  –Ottawa Citizen

  OTHER JOANNE KILBOURN MYSTERIES

  BY GAIL BOWEN

  The Nesting Dolls

  The Brutal Heart

  The Endless Knot

  The Last Good Day

  The Glass Coffin

  Verdict in Blood

  A Killing Spring

  A Colder Kind of Death

  The Wandering Soul Murders

  Murder at the Mendel

  Deadly Appearances

  Copyright © 2000 by Gail Bowen

  First M&S paperback edition published 2001

  This edition published 2011

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Bowen, Gail, 1942-

  Burying Ariel : a Joanne Kilbourn mystery / Gail Bowen.

  eISBN: 978-1-55199-615-8

  I. Title.

  PS8553.O8995B87 2011 C813′.54 C2011-900310-4

  We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.

  Published simultaneously in the United States of America by McClelland & Stewart Ltd., P.O. Box 1030, Plattsburgh, New York 12901

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2011925601

  Cover design: Terri Nimmo

  Cover art: © Grapix | Dreamstime.com.

  McClelland & Stewart Ltd.

  75 Sherbourne Street

  Toronto, Ontario

  M5A 2P9

  www.mcclelland.com

  v3.1

  Dedicado a Alejandra Delia Bowen-Diaz, nacido el 6 de Octubre, 1999

  Of everything I have seen

  it’s you I want to go on seeing

  –Pablo Neruda, “Amor,” from Extravagaria

  With thanks to Dr. David Barnard, who introduced me to the poetry of Denise Levertov and whose gentle presence ensures that the memebers of our univeristy community treat each other with collegiality and respect. Thanks as well to Drs. Lee Hunter, Joan Baldwin, and Linda Nilson for their extraordinary care. And as always, thanks to Ted for more than even he can imagine.

  Lines from “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost from The Poetry of Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Lanthem, copyright 1916, © 1969 by Henry Holt and Co., copyright 1944 by Robert Frost, are reprinted by permission of Henry Holt and Company, LLC.

  Lines from the song “Warrior” are reprinted by permission of Kim Baryluk of the Wyrd Sisters.

  Lines from “Adam’s Complaint” by Denise Levertov, from Poems 1960-1967, copyright © 1966 by Denise Levertov, are reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

  Excerpt from “Amor” / “Love” from Extravagaria by Pablo Neruda, translated by Alastair Reid. Translation copyright © 1974 by Alastair Reid. Reprinted by permission of Farrar and Giroux, LLC.

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  About the Author

  CHAPTER

  1

  The nails on the fingers that reached out to grab my arm as I left the Faculty Club’s private dining room were bitten to the quick, and the cuticles were chewed raw. The hand belonged to a man whose rage was so fierce he had taken to ripping his own body, but it had become as familiar to me as my own. It was ten minutes to one on the Thursday afternoon before the Victoria Day weekend. The celebration of the old Queen’s birthday may have been a signal to the rest of Canada to unbutton and unwind, but Kevin Coyle’s private demons didn’t take holidays.

  “I thought I was going to have to go in there and get you,” he said. “I have news.”

  “Kevin, there’s a celebration going on, remember? Today’s the luncheon for Rosalie.”

  Behind the Coke-bottle lenses of his horn-rims, his eyes glittered. “Does a party for an old maid who’s finally managed to snag herself a man take precedence over murder?”

  By his own assessment, my former colleague in the Political Science department hadn’t drawn a wholly rational breath since a group of female students had accused him of attitudinal harassment two years earlier. I removed his hand from my arm. “Put a sock in it, Kevin. It’s a holiday weekend. I’m declaring a moratorium on tortured metaphors. I don’t want to hear how your reputation as a gentleman and a scholar has been murdered.”

  He shook his head. “This murder is no metaphor, Joanne. It’s real, and I’m certain it’s connected to my case. A young man from the library just came up to the Political Science office. He’d been sent to find Livia. Of course, our esteemed head wasn’t there; nor were any of the rest of you. As usual, I was alone, so he delivered the news to me.”

  “And the news is …?”

  “A woman’s body has been found in an archive room in the basement of the library.”

  I felt my nerves twang. “Was she a student of ours? Is that why the man was looking for Livia?”

  Kevin took off his glasses. I’d never seen him without them. He looked surprisingly vulnerable. “Not a student, Joanne. A colleague. It was Ariel Warren.”

  For a moment, I clung to the grace of denial. “No! I just saw her this morning. She was wearing that vintage band jacket she bought to wear to Rosalie’s party.”

  “The jacket didn’t protect her,” Kevin said flatly. “I wish it had.” He swallowed hard, as if empathy were an emotion that had to be choked back. “Our profession is a cesspool, bu
t she was a decent young woman.”

  Kevin’s reference to Ariel in the past tense had the finality of a tolling bell. I felt my knees go weak. “She was only twenty-seven,” I said.

  “Too young to die,” he agreed.

  On the other side of the door, there was a burst of laughter. I closed my eyes. I’d known Ariel Warren since she was a child. My first memory of her was at a Halloween party we’d had for my daughter Mieka’s sixth birthday. Ariel had come as a sunflower, with a circle of golden petals radiating from her small face.

  “There could be a mistake,” I said, but my voice was forlorn, bereft of hope.

  Kevin put his glasses back on and peered at me. “Are you going to cry?”

  “Not yet,” I said. “Right now, I’m going over to the library to see what I can find out.” I looked hard at him. “Kevin, I don’t think either of us should say anything more until we’re sure we know the truth.”

  His laugh was a bark of derision. “The truth. You’ll never find out the truth about this. Mark my words. They’ll cover up the connection between this death and my case the way they’ve covered up everything else. Either that, or they’ll rearrange the facts to implicate me.”

  On a good day I could pity Kevin, but this was not a good day. I had to struggle to keep my composure. “Try to look at this the way a person with an ounce of decency would,” I said. “Someone has been murdered. This isn’t about you.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong,” Kevin said. “Ariel wouldn’t be in our department if it weren’t for me. And I know for a fact that she’d unearthed something that would exonerate me.”

  “Exactly what had she ‘unearthed’?”

  He shrugged helplessly. “They killed her before she had a chance to reveal what she’d found. That little coven that set me up will stop at nothing.” He patted my arm. “Tread carefully. I had only three friends in this department, and now it appears that two of them are dead.”

  As I watched him disappear down the stairs, I felt the first stirrings of panic. Kevin might be obsessive, but there was nothing wrong with his math. When the charges against him had surfaced, I was one of two people in Political Science who had sided with Kevin Coyle; the other had been Ben Jesse, our department head. Ben was a thoroughly decent man who feared unsubstantiated complaints, however serious, more than confrontation and nasty publicity. It was an ugly time for our department and for our university; it pitted us against one another and ended longstanding friendships. A man governed by expedience would have thrown Kevin to the wolves, but Ben was a person of principle. He defended Kevin because he believed in fairness and due process. His refusal to cave in to political bullying cost him dearly. In the midst of a lengthy and rancorous encounter with a group of students, Ben suffered a heart attack. He was, they told us later, dead before he hit the floor.

  Now there was another death.

  I reached the library just as a half-dozen police officers were coming through the door from outside. I was in luck; one of the officers was Detective Robert Hallam, the fiancé of Rosalie Norman, our department’s administrative assistant and guest of honour at our luncheon that day.

  Robert was a small, dapper man with a choleric temperament and an unshakeable belief that the world was divided into two camps: the good guys and the bad guys. I was both a friend of his beloved and a woman who had chosen a cop for her own beloved, so I had made the cut. In Robert’s estimation, I was one of the good guys, and as soon as he spotted me, he came over.

  “You’ve heard about this already?”

  “News travels fast at a university,” I said. “I need a favour. Can you tell me the name of the woman who was killed?”

  He shook his head. “I just got the call.” Robert scanned the lobby, then pointed to a man in a grey windbreaker who was taking photographs of the area around the elevator. “Eddie will have some answers,” he said. Robert walked over to the elevators. He and Eddie exchanged a few words; then Eddie handed him some pictures. Robert shuffled through them and came back to me.

  “The identification in the dead woman’s wallet belongs to Ariel Warren,” he said. “The deceased died as a result of a knife in the back. One wound, but it was a doozy. We’ve already sent someone to talk to the next of kin.”

  “Are those photographs of Ariel?” I asked.

  “They’re of the dead woman,” he said. “I never had the pleasure, so I can’t say for certain that Ariel Warren is the woman in the pictures.”

  “Could I see them?”

  He hesitated. “They’re graphic, but there’s one that’s not too bad.” He shuffled through the photos again, then held up a Polaroid. My throat tightened: the dark blond hair of the woman slumped on the table had fallen forward, but I could see the curve of her cheek and the shoulder of the scarlet band jacket she’d chosen to celebrate Rosalie’s joy.

  “It’s her,” I said.

  Robert Hallam’s face was grim. “I figured it was,” he said. “But when the deceased is a friend of a friend, you always hope you’re wrong. My Rosalie was very fond of that girl.”

  A thought occurred to me. “Rosalie still doesn’t know. None of them do. Robert, is it all right if I go back and tell them what’s happened, before the media get the story?”

  “You can tell them. Nobody should find out news like this from some jerk with a microphone.”

  “I agree,” I said. “This is going to be tough enough. Ariel had a lot of friends in our department.”

  “I’m sure she did.” Robert looked thoughtful. “Joanne, tell people to stick around, would you? We’ll need to talk to everybody who knew Ariel. She may have had a lot of friends, but she obviously had at least one enemy.”

  By the time I got back, the main dining room of the Faculty Club was deserted. The regular term was over, and people who taught in the spring session didn’t tend to hang around past lunch. The door to the private dining room was still closed, but I could hear the stereo. During lunch, we had listened to show tunes about love and marriage. Ed Mariani, with whom I co-taught the class Politics and the Media, had made the selections, and they ranged from the sublime to the sappy. Now it was Stanley Holloway singing “Get Me to the Church on Time,” and our ex-premier and newest department member, Howard Dowhanuik, was singing along in his tuneless, rumbling bass.

  I looked at my watch. It was ten past one. Four and a half hours earlier Ariel had been alive. Not just living, but triumphantly alive. For much of the winter, she had looked thin and unwell, but when I’d seen her as I headed for my office that morning she had been radiant. She’d been sitting on the academic green surrounded by the students from her Political Science 101 class. It had been a scene for an Impressionist: a high, blue sky, air shimmering with light, new grass splashed by crayon-bright plantings of daffodils and tulips, and in the foreground, a woman wearing a brilliant scarlet jacket, her dark blond hair knotted loosely at the nape of her neck, her profile gravely beautiful as she listened to the earnest voices of a freshman class. When Ariel had called out a greeting, I’d felt a current of connection, not just with her, but with what it had been like to be twenty-seven on a soft spring day, doing work that I knew I was good at and looking forward to a future of illimitable possibilities.

  There would be no more of those incandescent moments. Had anyone asked me that morning, I would have sworn that all of Ariel’s colleagues would have felt her loss as keenly as I did. Now I wasn’t sure. Kevin Coyle’s accusation had brought only a pinprick of doubt. Since the advent of his case, Kevin had floated a hundred wacko theories. His claims were easy to dismiss; Detective Robert Hallam’s observation wasn’t. Suddenly, I was in uncharted territory. The only thing I knew for certain was that for two people at Rosalie Norman’s luncheon, the loss would be personal and profound.

  Howard Dowhanuik’s son, Charlie, and Ariel had been lovers. To the outside world, it seemed an unlikely pairing. Charlie, with characteristic edge, referred to their relationship as the non-Disney version of Beauty an
d the Beast. The allusion was cruel but not inaccurate. Ariel had the kind of delicately sculpted porcelain beauty found most often in illustrations to fairy stories. Charlie’s face caused strangers to avert their eyes. He had been born with a port-wine birthmark that covered the right half of his face like a blood mask, and it had made his passage through childhood and adolescence an agony. Charlie’s pain hadn’t been eased by Howard’s total absorption in politics or by the spotlight that shone on the premier’s family in our small province. Through courage and a quick and acerbic wit, Charlie had made a life for himself, but until recently there had been no room in that life for his father. Loving Ariel and being loved by her had made Charlie generous. He had, at her urging, given Howard a second chance, and Howard had been humbly grateful.

  The other person to whom I dreaded breaking the news was the young instructor who had been hired with Ariel. Solange Levy was a difficult young woman, sensitive to slight and quick to anger. When she had arrived at our department to teach the previous September, the irony of her given name had been hard to ignore, but as her personal history became known to us, it was apparent that nothing in Solange’s life had given her cause to be sunny. The only child of a mother involved in a series of abusive relationships, Solange learned to take refuge in her studies. She had a gift for mathematics, and by the time she was in high school she’d decided that, in an uncertain world, a discipline that put a premium on reason and elegant proofs could offer her safe haven.

  On a snowy December day in 1989, she had been doing her homework and listening to the radio when she heard the news of the massacre at L’École Polytechnique. She was seventeen at the time. The event politicized her and defined her life. She abandoned mathematics and plunged into feminist theory and politics. Ten years later, she was a Ph.D. and a warrior. With her razor intellect, her sleek, muscular body, her Joan of Arc haircut, and her uniform of black T-shirt, black jeans, and ragged Converse high-top runners, Solange seemed more equipped for battle than friendship, but Ariel pierced her armour. The price Ariel’s death would exact from her best friend’s vision of human existence seemed beyond calculation.