The Glass Coffin 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

  Burying Ariel

  Verdict in Blood

  A Killing Spring

  A Colder Kind of Death

  The Wandering Soul Murders

  Murder at the Mendel

  Deadly Appearances

  Copyright © 2002 by Gail Bowen

  First M&S paperback edition published 2003

  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-

  The glass coffin : a Joanne Kilbourn mystery / Gail Bowen.

  eISBN: 978-1-55199-616-5

  I. Title.

  PS8553.O8995G53 2011 C813′.54 C2011-900311-2

  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: 2011925605

  Cover design: Terri Nimmo

  Cover art: © Guarant | Dreamstime.com

  McClelland & Stewart Ltd.

  75 Sherbourne Street

  Toronto, Ontario

  M5A 2P9

  www.mcclelland.com

  v3.1

  For my agent, Bella Pomer,

  and

  my husband, Ted Bowen,

  with love

  Thanks to Helen Rogge, who taught me how to make a marzipan pig with soul; to Joan Baldwin, the best family physician any family could hope for; and to the Saskatchewan Indian Federated College for a golden sabbatical year.

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  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

  If ever in her short life Linn Brokenshire had prayed for a good death, God hadn’t been listening. When she leapt from the top floor of Hart House on a bright October afternoon, bystanders said that midway into her plunge she seemed to change her mind, screaming the word “No” as she plummeted through the gold autumn air. No one who witnessed Linn’s fall would ever forget the anguish of that single word; nor would they forget how, hands clutching her worn copy of the New Testament, body trim in college-girl tartan, Linn had smashed into the pavement below. At her funeral, a lifelong friend eulogized her as a girl whose mind had broken when she couldn’t reconcile what university taught her with what she had learned in Sunday school. The eulogist was a simple man whose eyes welled when he said that Linn was the gentlest, most considerate girl he had ever known and that if she had ever imagined her death would hurt so many people it would have killed her.

  Seven years later, Annie Lowell met death in a manner that also seemed unnaturally cruel. Her life had been an act of defiance, a middle finger raised at the black spikes and slow waves that characterized the brainwave pattern she shared with Dostoevsky, Van Gogh, Napoleon, and millions of other epileptics. Wild at the post-production party of a film that later proved to be her breakthrough as an actor, she had pocketed the keys of a fellow guest, slipped down to the parking garage, and driven his Porsche at a speed the police clocked at 200 clicks before she ploughed into an oncoming semi and was decapitated. Free at last of the endless procession of doctors who had peered over her electroencephalograms and grimly pronounced her fate.

  Linked by the tragedy of dying young, Linn and Annie shared another bond. Both had been married to the same man, a filmmaker named Evan MacLeish. When the first two Mrs. MacLeishes had departed this world at an age well short of their Biblical allotment of three score and ten, Evan hadn’t wasted any time shaking a fist at the heavens; instead, he had kept his video camera rolling. The artist as alchemist, he had transferred his video to film and in so doing transformed the tragedy of his double loss into the gold of career-building movies.

  As I flicked off the VCR in my family room that chilly December morning, I had to admit the movies were brilliant. My admiration for the work did not extend to its maker. In my opinion, Evan MacLeish was a scumbag who, in violating the trust of two women who had loved him, had established himself as the lousiest choice for a life partner since Bluebeard.

  But my friend Jill Osiowy hadn’t asked my opinion. In thirty-six hours, barring cosmic catastrophe, she would become the third Mrs. Evan MacLeish. I am by nature an optimistic woman, but I wasn’t counting on a shower of meteorites.

  When it came to men, there had never been any happily-ever-afters for Jill. She was a terrific woman: loyal, generous, honest, and, like Winnie the Pooh, unobtrusively at your side when you needed her. She was also a consummate professional who for twenty-five years had succeeded in the air-kissing, daggers-drawn, axe-grinding, ego-driven world of network television without sacrificing either her sense of humour or her integrity. Simply put, she was amazing, but her built-in radar for bullshit flamed out as soon as a man came into her life. The best of Jill’s men were stud-muffins, big, tall pieces of man-candy whose Speedos were better filled than their noggins; the worst were drinkers, slackers, stoners, gamblers, liars, and, during one of the darkest periods of both our lives, a soc
iopath who abused her trust and her body. When she analyzed her history of romantic disasters, Jill had 20:20 vision. She had, she would sigh, been dumber than dirt. Those of us who cared for her sipped deeply from whatever we were sipping and remained silent. There was no point in arguing with the truth. Now Jill was in love again, and this time she was apparently convinced that the object of her affection was not just Mr. Right Now but Mr. Right.

  To be fair, the rest of the world would have seen Evan MacLeish as the answer to a maiden’s prayer. His documentaries drove critics to cringe-making clichés like “darkly nuanced” and “soul-shatteringly intimate.” Serious film fans deconstructed his oeuvre in earnest Internet chat rooms. Most importantly, he was on the A-list of every agency that cut the cheques that make movie production possible.

  No doubt about it, Evan’s future was, in the words of the hit song, so bright, you had to wear shades, yet when Jill had called from Toronto, where she’d been working as an independent producer, to announce her surprise engagement, she had been oddly reticent about the man she was going to marry. As she discussed her plans for a wedding in Regina with all her friends around her, she had fizzed with enthusiasm about Evan’s seventeen-year-old daughter, Bryn, but when I’d pressed her for details about Bryn’s father, she’d stonewalled, finally e-mailing me an interview with Evan MacLeish that had appeared in the New York Times. The writer, himself a young filmmaker, had clearly been awestruck in the presence of the great man. The toughest of his questions were soft lobs, and Evan hit them out of the ballpark. As he discussed an upcoming retrospective of his work, Evan was thoughtful and articulate. He was also, if the tiny photo on my computer screen was to be believed, as craggily handsome as the hero of a Harlequin romance. Looking at him, I could almost understand how Jill had convinced herself that she had caught the brass ring; what I couldn’t understand was how she could have missed the smear of blood on her shining prize.

  The Times article had been hagiography, but the subtext of the dead wives alarmed me enough to phone Jill back and ask if Evan’s track record didn’t raise any red flags for her. She’d dodged the question. “Just be happy for me,” she said.

  “Then give me a break,” I said. “Fill me in on the man who’s going to be guiding your hand as you slice into the wedding cake.”

  “If you want to know about Evan, look at his movies,” she said.

  I’d come up empty at our local video stores, but I found a distributor on the Internet who promised to rush order the two films I was keen to see: Leap of Faith, Evan’s documentary about the life and death of his first wife, and Black Spikes and Slow Waves, Annie Lowell’s story. The distributor’s definition of “rush order” apparently gave him a lot of wiggle room. The videos hadn’t arrived until the day before Jill’s wedding, but despite the fact that I had beds to make and bathrooms to clean, I’d hunkered down to watch.

  It had been a mistake. There was no disputing the value of the movies as art. Evan MacLeish had been a graduate student when he made Leap of Faith, and it was clear from the grainy images and jerky transitions between scenes that the movie had been shot on the fly and on the cheap. That said, it was a coolly professional piece of work without a single extraneous frame or moment of self-indulgence. Evan’s portrait of a woman whose mind had shattered when it collided with rationalist teachings inimical to her faith was the work of a mature artist who set his sights on a target and hit it.

  But the very assurance of the film raised an unsettling question about Evan’s relationship with his subject. In theory, his was the camera’s eye, unblinking, dispassionate, yet Linn continually addressed the man behind the camera, pleading with him, arguing with him, begging him to see her truth. In the scene before her suicide, she stared directly into the camera’s lens and sang the children’s hymn, “Jesus Bids Us Shine,” which ends with the image of a personal saviour who wants nothing more than to look down from heaven and see his followers shine “you in your small corner, and I in mine.” Eyes red from weeping, Linn begged her young husband for something to replace the Jesus who had been ripped from her heart. Evan didn’t even offer her a tissue. To my mind, that suggested a detachment bordering on the monstrous.

  Evan MacLeish’s film about the life and death of his second wife was the work of a man at the top of his game. He had learned many lessons in the decade between Leap of Faith and Black Spikes and Slow Waves, but apparently he hadn’t mastered compassion. Annie Lowell was an actor by profession and she clearly knew her way around a camera, but Evan’s betrayal of her was as complete as his betrayal of her sweet-faced predecessor. As I watched his meticulous recording of Annie’s attempt to embrace all of life pleasures before the screen faded to black, I wondered how the filmmaker could have subsumed the husband so completely. Annie was clearly a woman bent on self-destruction. Why hadn’t the man who loved her stopped her?

  I had tried all day to banish the images of Evan MacLeish’s wives by busying myself with the Mrs. Dalloway rounds of a woman planning a party, but the agony of these two very different women had burned itself into me. As I stood by the front door waiting to meet Jill and the man whose camera had captured those images, I had moved beyond concern to dread.

  It was the night before the winter solstice. When I had offered to hold the rehearsal dinner at our house, my eighteen-year-old son, Angus, who was habitually short of cash but long on inspiration, put himself in charge of producing a seriously great event. It had taken him many hours at the computer to ferret out traditions that weren’t flaky, but as I watched him sprint down the walk in his cut-offs and Mr. Bill sweatshirt, igniting the pine tar and paraffin torches that he had wrapped and hand-dipped, I knew that at least one of his decisions was a knockout. Within seconds, a dozen flames licked hungrily at the thin winter air and the scents of smouldering pine tar and peat smoke drifted towards us.

  My eight-year-old daughter leaned over the porch rail to watch the flames. “Angus says people used to build bonfires and light torches on the longest night of the year, so the spirits of the dead would stay away and the sun would remember to come back, but Mr. Kaufman says the dead don’t have spirits and the sun just appears to come back because the earth starts to tilt the right way.”

  “What do you think?” I asked.

  Taylor traced a pattern with her toe in the skiff of snow on our front porch. “I kind of like Angus’s story better,” she said.

  “So do I,” I said. “But, of course, I still believe in gnomes and pixies.”

  Taylor grinned. “Is that why you stayed in the garage with Angus when he was making his torches?”

  I drew her close. “Nope,” I said. “I just wanted to make sure there was someone there to drag him out if that tar and paraffin he was heating exploded.”

  “I heard that!” Angus twirled his torch triumphantly in the air. “As you can see, I’m still here. You worry too much, Mum.”

  “Just about the people I love.”

  “And that includes Jill,” Angus said. He peered down the street. “Hey, there are two taxis headed our way. This party is finally ready to rock and roll.”

  “Not without me, it isn’t.” Taylor jumped off the porch and ran down the walk. I followed her.

  As the first cab pulled up, Angus gave me a searching look. “You could try smiling,” he said. “You’re so weird about this wedding. Is there something the matter with this Evan guy?”

  “I hope not.”

  “Give him a chance. That’s what you always tell us.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll keep an open mind.” But the power of positive thinking was no match for the lingering intensity of the images captured by Evan MacLeish. Clearly, he was one hell of a filmmaker. As the second taxi slowed in front of my house, I knew in my bones that neither science nor dancing flames would keep the spirits of Linn Brokenshire and Annie Lowell from the party celebrating the marriage of one of my oldest friends to the man who had once been their husband.

  As Evan MacLeish eased out of
the taxi, I felt my nerves twang. There was no denying the fact that he was a stunningly attractive man, but he had the kind of physical presence that intimidates. He was tall, well over six feet, with a body so powerful that the exquisite tailoring of his handsome winter coat couldn’t disguise it. He bent to help Jill out of the car, then stepped towards me. His mane of greying hair curled onto his collar, a Samson image of potency, and his features were strong: heavy eyebrows, a large nose, full almost feminine lips, a cleft in his chin. For a beat, he looked around, taking in the scene, then his gaze settled on me. He had a sentry’s eyes, icy and observant. “The matron of honour,” he said, and he opened his arms to me.

  My response was atavistic and unforgivable. I froze, drawing my arms against my sides like a child steeling herself against the embrace of a loathsome relative. It was a gesture of stunning rudeness; one of those jaw-dropping episodes that offers no possibility of a graceful recovery.

  Evan raised an eyebrow. “Fearful of the villain’s clutches?” he said.

  I was fumbling for an answer when Jill joined us. Tall and lithe, Jill was born to wear clothes well. She was not a classical beauty. Her hazel eyes were a touch too close together, and her smile was endearingly crooked, but that night, in her full-length hooded cloak, she had the timeless elegance of the heroine in a medieval romance.

  Her face glowing with cold and excitement, she threw her arms around me. “Jo, it is so good to see you. And look at those torches! Absolutely spectacular!”

  “You’re looking pretty spectacular yourself,” I said shakily. “That cloak didn’t come from Value Village.”

  “My soul is still Value Village, but this is a gift from my mother-in-law-to-be. She wore it to her wedding.”

  “A woman who appreciates you,” I said. “I can hardly wait to meet her.”