Burying Ariel Read online

  Ed was in the front yard putting in bedding plants. We were a month shy of the longest day, and the light was mellow. He was wearing his uniform of choice: a generously cut shirt that he found so comfortable that he had had it made in a variety of fabrics and a palette of colours. Tonight’s was raspberry cotton, and as he approached the car with a flat of deep pink Martha Washington geraniums in his hands, he glowed with well-being.

  “Barry’s the gardener, but I thought I’d surprise him by putting in the old standbys. He can decide where his prima donnas will thrive.”

  “Is he out of town?” I asked.

  “In New York,” Ed said. “At a kitchenware convention. He’s doing so well he’s thinking of opening two more stores. A prisoner of the work ethic.” He bowed deeply to Taylor and crooked his arm in invitation. “But Barry’s obsession has dividends for you and me, Ms. Love.”

  Taylor took his arm. “I’ve decided to be Taylor Kilbourn, so I can be the same as everybody else in the family. But I’m still going to keep Love for my middle name. What do you think?”

  “I like it,” he said. He glanced at me questioningly.

  “I like it, too,” I said. “In fact, I couldn’t be more proud.”

  “In that case, Ms. Kilbourn, will you join me in paying a visit to the world’s most expensively housed nightingale?”

  I always felt a thrill when I entered Ed and Barry’s house. They had designed it themselves to take advantage of natural light, and it was a graceful and welcoming place. We could hear the nightingale’s sweet song as soon as we stepped into the living room. It had reason to sing. Its home was a floor-to-ceiling affair of bamboo, glass, and pastel silk screens; the aviary was lovely enough to be a piece of Japanese art. Taylor was enchanted.

  I turned to Ed. “When I’m old and addled will Barry build me a space like that? It’s magnificent.”

  “He’d jump at the chance,” Ed said. “Barry thrives on challenge. That’s why he’s been able to stay with me so many years.”

  “Nobody deserves a hero medal for living with you, Ed.”

  He blushed. “Rare praise, but deeply appreciated. Now, may I get you ladies a drink?”

  “Would it be all right if I looked at my mother’s painting?” Taylor asked. “I can hardly remember her at all any more, but when I look at the paintings she made, I can. I like that, and I like your nightingale, too. You have a lot of stuff that makes me happy.”

  As I followed Ed upstairs to the kitchen, I thought that Taylor’s assessment had been right on the money. I was surrounded by stuff that made me happy, too: a mahogany cabinet that glowed with a collection of mercury glass; a turn-of-the-century daguerreotype of a mother and child; an oval mirror whose bright ceramic border was a celebration of queens, young, old, gorgeous, ugly, real, and mythical. It was, Ed had told me once, a reminder to every queen that, however stunning she believes herself to be, there’s always a Snow White waiting in the wings.

  Ed took a pitcher filled with something pink and frothy from the refrigerator. He poured Taylor’s Shirley Temple into a fluted glass, stabbed a maraschino cherry with the toothpick handle of a paper umbrella, and positioned the umbrella carefully against the glass’s edge. He turned to me. “Now what’s your pleasure?”

  I pointed to the frosty pitcher of Shirley Temples. “I wouldn’t mind one of those.”

  Ed frowned in disbelief. “With or without umbrella?”

  “With,” I said. “It’s been a lousy day.”

  Ed and I took Taylor her drink, then carried our own onto the upstairs deck with its spectacular view of the bird sanctuary and the northwest edge of the university campus. It was almost twilight. Next door, Ed’s neighbour was making a last lazy pass across the darkening lawn with his mower, and his kids were playing hide-and-seek in the shadows. In the distance, the haze hanging over Wascana Lake was alive with the sounds of birds deep in the mystery of their epic migration north. Everything was as it had always been; yet everything had changed.

  Ed read my thoughts. “Out here it’s almost possible to forget, isn’t it?” he said softly.

  “Have you heard anything more?” I asked.

  “Just rumours. I stayed at the office till around four. I thought there might be something I could do. A few students came by to talk. There are some pretty wild stories going the rounds, but apparently the two with the most currency are that Ariel was killed either by an embittered ex-student or by the worker who found her.”

  “I don’t buy the ex-student angle,” I said. “Ariel hadn’t been teaching that long, and she was pretty intuitive. She would have picked up on a problem before it festered into a grudge. I don’t buy the worker theory either. How could someone get up in the morning, shower, shave, dress, and come to work to kill a perfect stranger?”

  “It happens,” Ed said.

  “Not at this university,” I said. “Another thing. I’ve taught here for years, and I’ve been in that archive room exactly once. There’s nothing down there but a bunch of mouldy Who’s Whos and some bound volumes of old periodicals.” I bit my lip in frustration. “As Daffy Duck would say, ‘This makes no sense and neither do I.’ ”

  Ed sipped his drink pensively. “Jo, you should probably know there’s a third rumour going the rounds. Apparently there’s talk that Charlie could be more than the grieving boyfriend.”

  I put my glass down so hard, the little umbrella toppled out. “Damn it, why don’t people think before they start spewing garbage like that?”

  Ed winced. “I shouldn’t have said anything,”

  “You didn’t start the rumour,” I said. “And if the story’s out there, it’s better to know, so Charlie can deal with it. Damn. I was so sure Howard was overreacting, but I guess he was right. This afternoon, we drove out to CVOX because he figured Charlie needed a lawyer.”

  Ed raised an eyebrow. “A lawyer, not a father …?”

  “Charlie had some problems with his father,” I said.

  “Haven’t we all,” Ed said tightly.

  I turned to him. “All the years we’ve known each other, I’ve never heard you even mention your father.”

  Ed’s usually genial face was a mask. “There was nothing to mention. He didn’t approve of the choices I made in my life. We quarrelled. He died. Case closed.”

  “Cases between children and their parents are never closed,” I said.

  Ed shrugged. “Let’s keep the focus on Charlie,” he said. “What went wrong between him and his father?”

  “Timing,” I said. “Charlie was born the night Howard was elected premier. Our daughter Mieka was born the same week. It was wild. We hadn’t expected to win the election. Almost all our members were rookies, and they had to learn everything from scratch. The day he was sworn in as attorney general, my husband didn’t even know where his office was. Of course, it was a hundred times worse for Howard. He was in charge. Everybody was expected to work fifteen hours a day; then dedication was supposed to kick in. Luckily for us, Mieka was a happy, healthy baby, so she didn’t suffer from having an absentee father …”

  Ed finished the sentence for me. “But Charlie suffered.”

  “He did,” I said. “So did Marnie. When your child is hurting, you’re hurting, and a lot of the time Charlie’s birthmark made his life a misery. Marnie never coddled him, but she was always there, encouraging him, making him laugh, trying to help him understand why people reacted the way they did.”

  “And where was his father in all of this?” Ed’s tone was wintry.

  “Marnie and Howard had a very traditional marriage,” I said. “She stayed home with the kids, and he saved the province. A lot of us made the same trade-off.” I was surprised at the bitterness in my voice.

  Ed’s look was unfathomable. “Another untold story?” he asked.

  “If it is,” I said, “it’s one without villains. We all did the best we could. Sometimes it just didn’t work out.”

  “And it didn’t work out for Charlie?”


  “It didn’t work out for any of them,” I said. “Charlie always excelled at school. He graduated when he was sixteen. By that time, Marnie and Howard had grown so far apart that when Charlie moved out to go to university, Marnie left, too. She started Ph.D. work at the Centre for Medieval Studies in Toronto. Howard was devastated. He moved east to try to win her back. But the lady was not for wooing. She was a devout Catholic, so divorce was out of the question, but she had no interest in reconciliation. She was having the time of her life.”

  “Where’s Marnie now?”

  It was a question I would have given anything to duck. But there was no evading the truth. “In a nursing home,” I said. “Her bike was hit by a car when she was on her way to class. Her injuries were incapacitating. She needs total care.”

  “That won’t change?”

  “No,” I said. “That won’t change.”

  “And Charlie blames his father,” Ed said quietly.

  I nodded. “He felt that if Howard had been a better husband and father, Marnie wouldn’t have left.”

  “And she wouldn’t have been in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “Something like that,” I said. “For the first year after the accident, Charlie wouldn’t even speak to Howard.”

  “But they were working things out …”

  “Because of Ariel. According to Howard, she was the one who convinced Charlie to give him another chance.”

  “Who got another chance?” Taylor was standing in the doorway to the deck. One of her braids had come undone, she had spilled some of her drink on her T-shirt, but as always, she was unfazed.

  “Your uncle Howard,” I said.

  “Ms. Cousin says everyone deserves a second chance,” Taylor said. “That’s why she didn’t send me to the principal’s office the time I broke her laptop.”

  “I never heard about that,” I said.

  “That’s because Ms. Cousin gave me a second chance,” Taylor said.

  Ed leaped up. “Perhaps it’s time for me to get you ladies a refill?”

  When Ed headed for the kitchen, Taylor trailed after him. I wandered to the end of the deck to watch the shifting layers of light that are the prelude to a prairie sunset. As Ed had said, out here it was almost possible to forget.

  The shrill of the cellphone in my bag was an intrusion from another world. Livia Brook’s voice was agitated. “Jo, why aren’t you here? There are things you and I should talk about before the vigil starts. You’ve only got about fifteen minutes.”

  “What vigil?”

  “I can’t believe you didn’t get any of my messages. I e-mailed you and I left word on your voice mail at the office and at home. I’ve just got your cellphone number from Rosalie. There’s a vigil for Ariel Warren tonight in front of the library. It’s supposed to start in fifteen minutes.”

  I looked across the parkway. A line of cars was snaking onto University Drive and knots of students were walking across the grass towards the library. The last thing I wanted to do was join them, but Livia sounded close to tears.

  “It’s important that we’re all at this event. For her. Please, Jo.”

  I swallowed hard. “Okay,” I said. “I’ll be there.”

  I ended the call and dropped the phone back in my bag. When I walked into the kitchen Taylor was perched on a bar stool pouring a bottle of Canada Dry into a blender filled with fruit juices.

  “We just have to add the crushed ice,” she said.

  “I’m afraid it’s going to have to be a quick drink, Taylor. We have another stop before we go home.” I looked across my daughter’s dark head at Ed Mariani. “I had a call from Livia on my cell. There’s a vigil for Ariel over at the library.”

  “Give me two minutes to change, and I’ll come with you,” Ed said.

  Taylor turned to me. “Who’s Ariel?”

  “A woman I taught with. She and Mieka used to play together when they were little. She died this morning.”

  “What happened?”

  “Someone killed her.”

  Taylor put the ginger ale bottle down carefully on the counter. “Why?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “Is the vigil to find out?”

  “No,” I said. “Sometimes after a person dies the way Ariel did, people just want to get together to think about the things that make us hurt each other.”

  Taylor nodded. “Evil,” she said.

  “Where did you hear about evil?” I asked.

  “Spiderman,” she said. “Every week, Spiderman has to fight evil. He always wins, but the next week there’s always more evil.” A frown crimped her forehead. “That’s just on cartoons, right?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m afraid that’s the way it is in real life, too.”

  CHAPTER

  3

  The distance between Ed’s house and the library was an easy five-minute walk; that night it was also a miserable one. Taylor, who usually hurtled headlong into the next adventure, walked quietly between Ed and me, holding our hands tightly. We were not alone. The three of us were part of a sorrowful cortège winding its way up University Drive towards the library. Two young women whom I recognized from the class Ariel had been teaching that morning rushed by, arms linked, faces swollen with grief. I squeezed Taylor’s hand, glad to be connected to her and, through her, to Ed.

  In good weather, the library quadrangle was filled with students catching a few rays while they read, gossiped, or just zoned out watching plumes of water arc up from the fountain. That night the gathering crowd was tense, and the air pressed down on us, heavy with uncertainty. A portable podium had been set up in front of the doors leading into the library, but no one was standing behind it.

  As I peered into the crowd, trying to see who was in charge, Ann Vogel, who had been a student in my Populist Politics class the year before, broke away from the group she was with and headed towards us. I felt my stomach knot. Ann was a sharp-featured brunette in her late thirties who had returned to school to find answers to the Big Questions. Judging from what I had seen of her, the answers she was finding were not to her liking. She was a sour and perpetually aggrieved woman who had involved herself deeply in the life of our department at a time when we had already far exceeded our quota of the sour and aggrieved. Midway through Populist Politics, she had changed her name from Ann to Naama. Assuming the name of the goddess who gave birth to Eve and Adam without the help of any male, even the serpent, may have connected Ann to the source of female power, but it hadn’t improved her analytical abilities, and she barely scraped through my class. The other class Ann did poorly in that semester had been Kevin Coyle’s International Law. She’d ferreted out the support of two other women whose grades in Kevin’s class failed to meet their expectations and set attitudinal-harassment charges in motion.

  Had Kevin shown himself to be attuned to the realities of life at a contemporary university, the charges would have sunk without a trace, but he was a crank and an anachronism who still believed academics were put on earth to point out the shortcomings of lesser beings. He had made enough bone-headed public remarks about both sexes to muddy the waters and, bottom-feeder that she was, Ann Vogel had snapped up a veritable feast of comments he had made that could be construed as sexist. Kevin had responded to the charges with his usual pit-bull intransigence, but his defenders had argued that Kevin was a misanthrope, not a misogynist, and the case was about to sputter out from lack of oxygen when a far more serious incident erupted and fanned the flames.

  A fourth-year student named Maryse Bergman accused Kevin Coyle of rape. Her tale was unsettling, in part, because the exposition was a familiar one to many who had dealt with people in positions of power. Maryse said that when she had approached Kevin with a request for a letter of recommendation to graduate school, he had suggested a quid pro quo: a glowing reference in return for sexual favours. Here the narrative took an ugly twist. According to Maryse, when she turned Kevin down, he attempted to rape her.

  The alle
ged assault took place late on a Friday afternoon, when most of us had started our weekends, but there had been witnesses – not to the attack, but to its aftermath. Maryse, obviously distraught, had run down the hall until she found someone in our department ready to believe and, more significantly, verify her tale. Oddly, Maryse had insisted the police not be called. Later that evening, when Ben Jesse called all of us to alert us to the incident, that behaviour alone had made me suspicious. So had the fact that Maryse travelled in the same circles as Ann Vogel.

  By Monday morning, the whispering campaign was spreading and Kevin was seething. According to him, Maryse Bergman had appeared in his office without an appointment. They had talked in general terms about graduate school, then, inexplicably, she had screamed and run from his office. When I asked if he had done anything that could be construed as a sexual overture, he erupted. “As if I would need her,” he said. “As if I would need any woman. Or any man for that matter. I don’t need anybody. Sex is of no interest to me. I have my work.” I had been convinced. Unfortunately for Kevin, I was in the minority.

  My public explanation for supporting Kevin was that I believed in due process, but like most justifications, mine concealed as much as it revealed. My motivations were far from altruistic. As someone who had taught university for years, I had watched the chill of political correctness freeze spontaneity, creativity, and intellectual daring. A single lapse of caution could ensnare a teacher in a morass of charges that, even if unjust and unproven, could tar her reputation forever. The possibility that one day it would be my turn to be accused was real. This time I had dodged the bullet, but every time I looked at Kevin Coyle, I knew that there, but for the grace of a missing Y chromosome, went I.

  The dénouement of the Maryse Bergman case was surprising, at least to me. The week after her accusation against Kevin, she left town. There didn’t appear to be anything sinister about her departure. I saw her in the halls a couple of times, returning books or saying goodbye to friends, then she moved on. The day after she left, a deputation headed by Ann Vogel confronted Ben Jesse accusing him of a cover-up. It was Ben’s final battle. After his death, there was a rush to choose an interim department head and make the new appointments. Maryse was forgotten – forgotten, that is, by everyone except Ann Vogel, who kept the rumours on the boil, and by Kevin Coyle, who had to live under the cloud of unproven accusations.