Gail Bowen - The Glass Coffin

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 sociopath 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 cliches 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.