Gail Bowen - The Last Good Day

Annoyed by my self-pity, I put Mrs. Ramsay back on the shelf and went to the kitchen to check out the possibilities for dinner. Rose was bringing Taylor home at three-thirty. Knowing my daughter, she’d be keen for a swim. If I got dinner started, she and I could take our time at the beach.

I might have been unlucky in love, but I was lucky in the kitchen. I’d been at the farmers’ market the day before and picked up a basket of tomatoes, some fresh basil, and a block of Taylor’s favourite white cheddar. I had a loaf of wild-rice bread in the freezer. Taylor loved smoked tomato soup. A mug of soup and a grilled cheese sandwich would be just the ticket after we came back from the lake.

I’d just finished chiffonading the basil when Rose and the girls came in. Isobel Wainberg was carrying a Zellers bag from which only the tips of her knitting needles protruded, but Taylor and Gracie were waving their handiwork like flags.

“Look at this,” Taylor said, shoving six inches of a hyacinth scarf towards me. “Isn’t this great? The very first thing I ever knitted. Rose’s sister, Betty, says I took to it like a duck to water.”

Gracie swung her creation from side to side. Her knitting, large-looped and irregular, flopped dispiritedly. She laughed. “Betty says I have many other talents.”

“You do,” Isobel said loyally. “You don’t always worry about doing everything perfectly. That’s a talent.”

“And,” Taylor added, “you can shoot hoops better than Angus. Now, who wants to eat?”

The girls raced to the kitchen, leaving Rose and me behind. “Can I get you something?” I asked. “Some tea or a cold drink?”

Rose looked critically at a loose button on her sundress. “I appreciate the thought,” she said, “but you don’t have to entertain me. I’m happy just to sit.”

“Me too,” I said. “And thanks to you, I got to sit all afternoon. Taylor obviously had a great time.”

Rose snapped off the errant button. “I’ll take care of you when I get home,” she said, popping the button in her pocket. She turned her attention to me. “That girl of yours surprised me today,” she said. “She’s a free spirit, and free spirits are hard to rein in – not that you want to. All the same, it makes it easier for everybody when they find something that they like to do. Your girl really concentrated on her knitting. She’s got an idea that she wants to knit a bedcover made of squares. She drew what she wanted so Betty could help her with the patterns. They were interesting – all different kinds of fish and shells. Your girl has a knack.”

“Taylor’s birth mother was an artist,” I said. “Her name was Sally Love. She was brilliant, and when we were growing up, she was my closest friend. After she died, I adopted Taylor.”

“So the gift was passed down. It isn’t always,” Rose said. She picked up the knitting that Gracie Falconer had abandoned and smiled at the loose, loopy stitches. “You can tell a lot about a person by the way she knits. I taught this one’s mother. From the first day, she never dropped a stitch. She never has.”

We were silent, listening to the laughter drift from the other room. “So you’ve known Lily for a long time.”

“All her life,” Rose said. “We’re from the same reserve.”

“And Alex Kequahtooway?”

Rose’s jaw tightened. “I know him,” she said.

“Were he and Lily friends when she was growing up?”

“On a reserve everybody knows everybody,” Rose said. Her mouth snapped shut like a coin purse. Clearly there’d be no more revelations coming my way today. “Remember that old saying, ‘Curiosity killed the cat’?” she said.

“My grandmother used to tell me that when I was sticking my nose in where it didn’t belong.”

“Well, I’m saying it to you now.” Rose picked up Gracie’s knitting and Isobel’s Zellers bag. “Thanks for the visit. It’s good to get to know new people.”

In the days before the funeral, the partners of Falconer Shreve stayed at the lake, grieving, planning, and cleaving to one another. It was rare to see any of them alone. The weather had turned hot, and Lawyers’ Bay was enveloped by a kind of hazy unease as we waited for the heat to break and for the funeral that would rescue us from the limbo into which Chris Altieri’s death had banished us. Life went on, but there was sadness in the summer air. There was also uncertainty. The police hadn’t yet ruled out the possibility that Chris’s death had been an accident; however, their search for a suicide note had proved fruitless. Without a Rosetta stone to unlock the mystery of why a man who had everything to live for would choose to die, questions persisted, painful as a troubling tooth. Why would a man who loved his friends so deeply leave no explanation for an act that he knew would plunge them into confusion and painful self-examination?

And given that Chris Altieri’s death was a suicide, why were the police investigating the tragedy with such thoroughness? Alex Kequahtooway’s silver Audi was much in evidence. More than once I saw it turn into Lily Falconer’s driveway. It never turned into mine. On Coffee Row, rumours grew like mushrooms after a three-day rain. Distracted, the people of Lawyers’ Bay went through the motions of life at a summer cottage, and I came to know my neighbours.

Taylor, Gracie, and Isobel had become inseparable, and that meant Rose Lavallee and I were drawn together too. From the moment I met her, I liked and trusted Gracie’s nanny, but Taylor was one of the joys of my middle age and I wasn’t about to miss a summer with her. And so when Rose and the girls went off on adventures, I tagged along, and after her initial surprise, Rose seemed to welcome my presence. When the girls decided they wanted to learn how to dive from the tower, Rose and I took on the task together.

The arrangement worked well. At seventy, Rose had a face that bore the chisel marks of time, but her body was wiry, and what she didn’t know about dealing with young girls wasn’t worth knowing. She was, Taylor confided, very strict about bathing suits. That summer, prepubescent girls who still had trouble keeping track of their retainers were wearing the skimpiest of string bikinis, suits designed to entice with provocative peeks at budding breasts and belly-button rings. My daughter and I had had a stormy exchange on the second floor of the Bay about how much of her was going to be on display that summer. When I saw Gracie and Isobel in their functionally cut navy Spandex one-piece suits, I knew Rose was my kind of woman.

The diving lessons turned out to be a boon for me as well as for the girls. Climbing the tower, testing the spring of the board, then plunging into the dark, inscrutable waters and counting on muscle memory to guide me back into sunlight proved to be surprisingly therapeutic. And Rose was good company: silent unless something needed to be said. Neither of us returned to the subject of Alex, Lily, or the old days at Standing Buffalo. At some level, we both recognized that our friendship was too new and too fragile to withstand a blast from the past.

That didn’t mean that blasts weren’t in the offing. One morning, just after Rose and I had swum back from the tower and were sitting on the dock watching the girls, Blake Falconer appeared. His red-gold hair was cut scrub-brush short for summer, and his skin was ruddy with the sunburn of a weekend sailor. In his shorts, runners, and University of Saskatchewan sweatshirt, he had the breezy confidence of a man who had spent his college years being envied by men and longed for by women. Not the kind of person who usually made my Christmas-card list, yet Kevin had told me that, next to Chris, Blake was his closest friend.