The Brutal Heart Read online

  “Where are the horses?” I said.

  “We have to build them,” Madeleine said.

  “Fair enough,” I said. “If you tell me the pieces you need, I’ll hand them to you, but Lego is not my forte.”

  “What’s a forte?” Lena asked.

  “Something you’re good at,” Madeleine said. “Like your forte is running and climbing and doing the monkey bars.”

  Lena nodded happily. “I am good at the monkey bars.”

  Mieka appeared with a tray of juice boxes. “Madeleine is too modest to point out that her forte is reading. Keith, your older grandniece is already reading chapter books.”

  “I’m impressed,” Keith said. “With both the monkey bars and the chapter books. They’re great kids, Mieka.”

  “I have lots of help,” my daughter said. “Of course, I also have Zack to deal with. Mum, do you know what he sent the girls this morning?”

  “Let me tell,” Lena said, her dark eyes growing large. “A bunch of candy.”

  “The idea is it’s like a bouquet of flowers,” Madeleine said. “Except instead of flowers it’s all lollipops. It’s really pretty. Of course, Lena wanted to eat it.”

  I put my arm around Madeleine’s shoulder. “And you want to keep it the way it is forever.”

  Madeleine put a last piece of Lego on her corral. “Not forever,” she said. “Just for a long time.”

  Lena was facing the door. Suddenly, she leapt up with such force she almost knocked the little table flying. “Here’s Zack.”

  Madeleine was off too.

  Keith watched as the girls reached out to my husband. “I wish I’d thought to bring a candy bouquet,” he said, and his tone was wistful.

  Mieka grimaced. “Well, I don’t. One overindulgent male in their lives is enough.”

  “Still, it would be nice to get the kind of greeting Zack’s getting.”

  “The girls spend a lot of time with Zack and Mum. Why don’t you come over to the house tomorrow night for supper? Get to know the kids better.”

  “I’d like that,” Keith said.

  At that moment, Zack joined us, and as always when he came into a group, the dynamic changed. He was the least egotistical of men, but his charm was potent.

  “It’s the candy man,” I said.

  “Don’t be dismissive. It took me an hour on the Internet to chase that thing down.”

  “My hero.” I said. I went over and kissed him.

  He drew me close. “Thanks for the kiss,” he said. “Everything okay now?”

  “It will be,” I said.

  “Good,” he said. He extended his hand to Keith. “Zack Shreve,” he said. “And, of course, I recognize you. It’s good to finally meet you.”

  Mieka turned to me. “Mum, I could use a little help with crowd control while Ginny’s people set up their cameras. Why don’t we let these two get acquainted?”

  It was pleasant to be in a room bright with the colours of a crayon box, listening to the sounds of kids laughing while the rain pounded down outside. Mieka served sandwiches and juice and cookies; the shoot went well. Even Milo O’Brien seemed to relax. When I walked by he had a piece of broccoli in his hand.

  “Is that what I think it is?” I said.

  He laughed. “You know, it’s not half bad.”

  The questions from the young mothers and a few fathers were centred naturally enough on family, and Ginny talked consistently about family values in a way that made that hackneyed shibboleth of the right sound like something other than a code for exclusion of all but the few. I had never really listened to her before, and she was impressive. I was beginning to see Keith’s point. Whenever I glanced their way, Keith and Zack seemed to be enjoying each other’s company. As Sean said, all was well.

  I was picking up empty sandwich plates when my husband beckoned me over. “Keith, I know this is rude, but there’s something I have to talk to Jo about.”

  “Not a problem,” Keith said. “I should go and check in with Ginny anyway. I enjoyed our talk.”

  “So did I. Come over to the house for a drink before you leave town. We can continue our discussion about the Jays’ amazing ability to self-destruct.”

  Keith smiled. “A topic with infinite possibilities. I’ll be there.”

  I sat in the chair Keith had vacated. “So what’s up?”

  Zack leaned close and lowered his voice. “Blake just called. He wanted to let me know that, against my advice, he’s going to Cristal’s funeral.”

  I closed my eyes. “I am so tired of Cristal Avilia.”

  “Well, she’s incinerated and in an urn at the funeral home, so I can’t see her posing a threat for much longer.”

  “Now you’re angry,” I said.

  “You bet I am. Cristal’s dead. You and I are alive – seemingly to fight another day. But this is neither the time nor the place for us to duke it out. I just wanted you to know that I’m going to the funeral with Blake.”

  “Why? Blake’s an adult. He doesn’t need a chaperone. If he wants to be there, he should be there.”

  “Jo, we should probably try to keep our voices down. People are staring at us. I wouldn’t give a shit except this is Mieka’s party and I don’t want to wreck it. And, to answer your question, Blake should not be at the funeral. There’ll be cops there. They still haven’t found Cristal’s killer, and they entertain the not wholly unfounded belief that murderers go to the funerals of their victims.”

  “Blake was in love with Cristal,” I said. “He wouldn’t have killed her.”

  “People kill people they love every day of the year, Jo. Blake doesn’t have an alibi. The police haven’t nosed around, because they have no reason to connect him with Cristal, but if he shows up, they’ll start wondering why. And Blake is in no shape to deal with a cop who decides to come down hard on him.”

  “So you’re going to go to the funeral with him.”

  “Right. If I’m there, the focus will shift. Debbie knows I had a connection to Cristal, and she knows I didn’t kill her. Blake could just be there as my friend.”

  “That’s not good enough,” I said.

  “You’re probably right, but I’m out of options. I’m also a little tired, so unless you pull a Margot and throw tacks under my wheelchair, I’m out of here.”

  I stood up. “I’ll come with you,” I said.

  “Suit yourself,” Zack said. “The funeral is at Speers at two.”

  “Half an hour.”

  “Plenty of time. I guarantee parking won’t be a problem. I don’t imagine many of Cristal’s intimates will want to run the gauntlet.”

  “I guess funerals aren’t part of their fantasies,” I said.

  Zack looked at me hard. Then he turned his wheelchair and began his careful passage through the kids and the blocks, past the pink plastic castle and the fort with the drawbridge till he came to the door that opened out into the real world.

  CHAPTER 8

  Zack had arranged to drive to the funeral with Blake, so I went alone. As my husband had predicted, parking wasn’t a problem, but I chose a place two blocks away because I needed a walk to cool down.

  There were no mourners in sight, and when I opened the door to Speers, six people in the solemn garb of funeral-home employees leapt to attention. Obeying a choreography as perfectly executed as the movements in a kabuki dance, one of the employees took my umbrella, a second led me to the memorial book where a third opened a page, still blank, and handed me a pen. When I had written my name, a young man with a crewcut so short that his scalp peeked pinkly through, placed two fingers under my elbow, waited as another employee handed me a funeral program, then guided me past the gleaming empty pews to a seat in the second row behind the only other mourner in the room.

  If I’d been quick, I would have said that my husband, who would be joining me, was in a wheelchair and that we’d be more comfortable sitting at the back, but the tensions of the morning had beaten me down. I sat where I was told to sit. When I
murmured my thanks to the usher, the young woman ahead of me turned to stare.

  Surprisingly, she giggled. “I might as well sit next to you, right? Or maybe you could sit next to me?” Her eyes took in the empty room. “I thought there’d be more people.” She looked back at me. “So will you? Sit with me, I mean? I’m Mandy Avilia – Cristal’s sister.”

  I moved to the place beside her. At first I couldn’t detect a family resemblance. Cristal had been slight, doll-like, and ethereal. This young woman was unabashedly carnal. Her sleeveless black dress was cut low to showcase the peachy skin of her arms, throat, and breasts. Her shoulder-length hair was dark and springy with life, and her mouth was wide and sensual.

  “Were you a friend of my sister’s?” she asked.

  I thought of Blake. “A friend of a friend,” I said.

  “Well, that’s nice,” Mandy said. She held the funeral program in front of me. “Do you like the picture I chose?” she asked. “When Cristal was little, the photographer in our town had a beautiful baby contest. Cristal won. The prize was a picture on her birthday every year till she turned sixteen.” Mandy gulped. “After she turned sixteen, Cristal still got her picture taken every year for her birthday. That’s the last one. I just love it.”

  It was a professional photograph, soft-focused and romantic – the kind of portrait a girl might give to her lover or use to announce her engagement. Cristal’s hair was blonder and longer than it had been in the DVD with Zack. She’d grown out her bangs and added a soft wave that framed her heart-shaped face. A swath of ivory chiffon was draped around her bare shoulders. Her lips were slightly parted, but she wasn’t smiling. There was a private sadness about her. Underneath were the words Portrait of A Lady.

  Out of nowhere I remembered the stillness and grace of Ned Osler’s apartment at the Balfour – how the fire had burned low as he and I talked. That was how Ned saw Cristal, that chameleon woman who could become any man’s fantasy.

  “She was beautiful, wasn’t she?” Mandy said.

  “Yes,” I agreed.

  “That day when the man from the lawn service found her, she was holding a book called Portrait of a Lady. The police say the murderer must have put the book in her hands. Why would anybody do that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Mandy turned her eyes to me. “There is so much I don’t understand. I loved my sister, but I never really knew her. I never knew what it was she wanted. When I saw the book, I thought maybe that was it.”

  “To be a lady.”

  Images of Cristal thrusting her body against Zack’s crowded my mind, and I turned away from Mandy’s large and trusting eyes.

  There was a murmur of voices at the back of the room, and I saw Zack and Blake. Zack beckoned to me.

  “The man in the wheelchair is my husband,” I said. “I should go back and sit with him.”

  “There’s plenty of room in the aisle right beside me,” Mandy said. “I don’t want to sit alone.” That seemed to end the discussion.

  I went back and bent close to my husband. “That’s Cristal’s sister. There’s no one to sit with her.”

  Zack muttered an expletive under his breath, but he turned his wheelchair and came up the centre aisle. Blake followed. They positioned themselves so they were on either side of Mandy and me. The portrait of Cristal was on a table beside an urn whose purpose was unmistakable. A spray of purple cattleya orchids drifted between the portrait and the urn. When he took in the arrangement, Blake flinched, but he remained composed.

  Zack leaned towards Mandy. “I’m Zack Shreve. I’m a lawyer. Your sister paid me to represent a homeless woman who’d run into some legal difficulties. It was an act of real kindness.”

  Mandy’s eyes welled. “Cristal was a good person.” Blake held out his hand to Mandy. “She helped a lot of people.”

  Mandy looked around. “Then why aren’t more people here?”

  “I don’t know,” Blake said.

  The funeral director who had led me to my seat came and reminded Mandy gently that it was two o’clock – time to begin the service.

  “Could we wait five minutes?” she asked. “There might be other people.”

  She was right, there were other people – four of them. The first two – an imposing woman in grey and a younger man with a powerful body that appeared to strain the seams of his black suit – arrived together. When I caught Zack’s attention, he mouthed the word cops. Francesca Pope required no identification. Her appearance at Cristal’s funeral seemed inevitable. Like a persistent and troubling image in a Fellini film, Francesca seemed destined to appear and reappear until her role in the drama became clear. The final mourner was a surprise to everyone but Mandy. Just as the first lugubrious notes of “Amazing Grace” filled the chapel, Margot Wright joined the party. She came straight to the front and took Mandy’s hands in hers.

  The tears streamed down Mandy’s face, but she was beaming. “I knew if you could possibly make it, you’d be here,” she said.

  Margot’s own eyes were welling. “Hey, Cristal was a Wadena girl, and Wadena girls stick together, right?”

  Margot pulled a pocket pack of tissues from her bag. She took one and handed the pack to Mandy. Beside me, my husband was, for once, speechless.

  The service was generic and mercifully short. The minister, who introduced himself as “the Reverend Kevin,” had an overbite and a gentle manner. When he offered the standard apology for “not having had the privilege to know Cristal in life,” Zack and I exchanged glances. The Reverend Kevin didn’t dwell on the specifics of Cristal’s life. He talked about the mystery of human existence – a topic with which no one could take issue – then he led us through the Twenty-third Psalm and the Lord’s Prayer. The service concluded with the children’s hymn “Jesus Loves Me.”

  When the service was over, Francesca and the police vanished, Zack and Blake and I shook hands with Mandy Avilia, and Margot offered to take Mandy out for a drink. We walked outside together, then we went our separate ways. Blake went back to the office, and Zack and I got into my car to go home. As soon as we were inside the car, I exploded.

  “Why weren’t there more people there?” I said.

  Zack’s jaw was set. He was trying to control his anger. “Jesus, Jo, you’re not twelve years old. You know the answer to that.” He lowered his voice. “You’re not going to like this, but I’ve seen the DVDS that were sent to Cristal’s clients. She gave each of those men something they weren’t getting anywhere else.”

  “Sex?”

  “Intimacy. I know you think Cristal’s clients were self-indulgent pricks, but if you’d been at our house the other day, you might have a different opinion. Those men lost something precious, and they were grieving.”

  “Privately,” I snapped. “Away from the prying eyes of their wives and children. Did it occur to any of them to do the hard work of finding intimacy in a real relationship? You know, the kind where you don’t pay to get your own way, where you ask the woman about her needs?”

  “Let’s get out of here,” Zack said.

  Dinner that night was a tense affair. After we’d cleared the table, and Taylor went to her room to do homework, Zack turned to me. “Do you want to go over and see the avocets?”

  “It’ll be too muddy for your chair,” I said.

  “Fuck it. If I get stuck, I get stuck. You can leave me there.”

  I felt my throat close. “I’ll never leave you, Zack.”

  He pulled his wheelchair closer to me. “Then why are we sitting here making each other miserable? Jo, we’re not kids. If there were an actuary here, do you know what she would say?”

  “No.”

  “She’d say, ‘Look at the numbers – they’ll give you an idea of how much time you have left together. Go and see the fucking avocets.’ ”

  And so we put on our jackets and drove to the south side of the Broad Street Bridge. The slope that led down to the sandy shoreline was slick, and Zack needed help with his chair, b
ut we made it. We found a spot where we could sit and watch the avocets and the willets and the sandpipers without intruding in their world. The heart of the city was five minutes away, but that cool, misty evening, the only noises we heard came from waves slapping against the sand and shorebirds going about the business of their lives.

  For the first time since Cristal Avilia’s murder, we were at peace, and when Zack reached out and took my hand, I felt something broken in me slide back into place.

  “It would be nice to stay here forever, wouldn’t it?” he said. “No phones. No problems. No fights.”

  “Just us and the birds.” I said. I smiled at him. “You’d miss your martinis.”

  “You’d miss the kids,” he said. “Actually, there’s a lot we’d miss. I think we’re going to have to face it, Ms. Shreve – becoming the bird people by the Broad Street Bridge may not be in our future.”

  “We’ll have to figure something else out,” I said. I moved closer to him. “Do you remember what the dean said at our wedding?”

  Zack nodded. “I remember everything about that day, Joanne. I remember everything about all our days. James said that marriage is a leap of faith, but we’d make it if we remembered to hold on to each other and never let go.”

  I raised our linked hands. “I guess we just have to keep holding on.”

  “That’s no problem for me.” Zack gazed at the sky. “It’s getting dark. Time to call in the dogs, piss on the fire, and saddle up.”

  I looked at the muddy slope we had to climb, pushed myself to my feet, and took the handles of Zack’s chair. “Okay,” I said. “Let’s go home.”

  In the next week, Zack and I slipped gratefully back into our old and comfortable ways. We stopped using words as percussive instruments with which we could set each other vibrating, and the silences between us were no longer heavy with things unsaid. Life went on.

  The campaign moved into warp speed, and for Ginny the signs were good. Experienced politicians don’t need a psephologist to know how an election is going. If the candidate is dogged by a persistent cold; if the campaign literature arrives from the printers late and with a typo stating the candidate has given his life to pubic service; if the bus breaks down; if the heavens open up on the one scheduled outdoor event; if the crowds dwindle; if the media’s attention wanders; and if the staffers are snarling at one another, a campaign manager knows without checking Decima or Ekos that the candidate is tanking.