Gail Bowen: Burying Ariel

I headed them off. “I’ll tell you what I know,” I said. “But it isn’t much.”

I gave a quick sketch of events. When I was finished, I turned to Rosalie. “I was grateful that Robert was there,” I said. “He was very helpful.”

Despite the tears welling in her eyes, Rosalie coloured with pride. “He’s a credit to his profession,” she said.

“He certainly was today,” I agreed. “And it can’t have been easy for him to decide how much he could divulge when the case was still unfolding. I guess, at the moment, the only unassailable fact is that the dead woman was Ariel.” I looked around the table. “Detective Hallam has asked us all to stick around so the police can ask their questions. It might be best if we just go back and wait in our offices.”

Not surprisingly, it was Rosalie, our link with authority, who framed the question that was at the forefront of all our minds. “Do the police know who did it?”

I shook my head. “No,” I said, “but I’m sure by now they have some leads.”

“It will have been a man.” Solange’s voice was flat with resignation.

Livia’s echo was choric. “A man,” she repeated.

For a beat, the only sounds in the room came from the stereo. Carly Simon was singing “The Boy That I Marry.” My eyes took in the men in our department. None of them met my gaze. We all knew something ugly was being loosed in this room.

“No one knows who did this, Solange,” I said quickly.

She whirled to face the guests at the table. Her eyes blazed. For the first time in my memory, Solange was wearing a dress, a sleek black mini whose hemline skimmed the top of her thighs. When she arrived for lunch, she had pirouetted in it mockingly. “To prove to Ariel I can play the game if I choose to,” she had said. The young woman in front of me was through playing games.

Howard Dowhanuik had been sitting closest to Solange. Now he stood and moved to comfort her. His old hawk’s face was broken, but his voice was steady. “We’re not all the enemy, Solange. Charlie loved Ariel. So did I.”

“Bullshit.” Solange pronounced the expletive in faux French – bouleshit. As these two people whose lives had been transformed by Ariel Warren faced one another, the word hung in the air, sibilant and powerful. Finally, Solange turned away. She reached into her small, black over-the-shoulder bag. For a terrible moment, I thought she was going to pull out a weapon, but all she extracted was a package of Player’s and a Bic lighter. She removed a cigarette, then threw the pack down on the table. Her hands were trembling so badly she couldn’t make her lighter work.

Wordlessly, Howard took the Bic and lit her cigarette. She dragged on it deeply, then turned and walked towards the window. It had been fifteen years since I’d quit smoking, but at that moment I badly wanted a cigarette. I wasn’t the only one. Livia Brook surprised me by taking a Player’s from Solange’s pack and lighting it. It was as startling as seeing Preston Manning at a Tool concert. Livia’s marriage to Kenneth Brook had flamed out in a haze of booze and cigarette smoke, but since they’d split she had become zealous about her health. Everything that entered her body or touched her person had to be organic and unadulterated. Suddenly, it seemed as if the whole world was out of joint.

As the pungent bite of burning tobacco filled the air, I gazed again at the last of Rosalie’s guests. When the announcement had been made that Livia was the new head of Political Science, Ed Mariani had whispered to me that she would find running our department as rewarding as herding cats. There was more truth than poetry in the image. We were a group of proud and headstrong individualists, certain we’d worked out the answers to all the questions that mattered. Ariel Warren’s death was revealing an unpalatable truth: our assurance was veneer-thin. We were badly in need of direction. Despite the fact that her composure was showing serious fault lines, Livia Brook supplied it.

She walked over to the stereo, flicked it off, and then returned to her place at the table. In her mid-forties, Livia still had something of the undergraduate about her. Her wardrobe ran to corduroy jumpers, tights, and Birkenstocks, and her hair, a mass of shoulder-length curls, now more grey than chestnut, still had a certain Botticelli abundance. She wore little or no makeup. Her great beauty was her skin, which she kept exquisite with Pears soap and hot water. On the wall behind her desk was a sampler done in cross-stitch. “No Surprises,” it said, and it summed up both her post-divorce philosophy and her administrative style. Livia did her homework, ran the department with a fair and equitable hand, and, despite her newly acquired penchant for the rhetoric of empowerment and uplift, had the common sense to extinguish brushfires before they flared out of control. It was a valuable attribute in a department as deeply mired in crisis as ours had been when she’d taken over. Now there was another crisis, and apparently Livia had decided that it would be wise to channel our emotions.

“I think a moment of silence so each of us can deal with our feelings privately might be appropriate.” Her voice was firm, but as she steadied herself against the table edge, her narrow fingertips trembled. Like grateful sheep, all of us, including Solange, scrambled to our feet, and when Livia bowed her head, we followed her lead.

When a suitable amount of time had elapsed, Livia rescued us from our private thoughts. “Some of you may be uneasy about what you’re experiencing right now. Don’t judge yourself. Feelings are neither right nor wrong. They simply are, and they deserve validation.”

In the months since she’d become department head, Livia had often offered the soothing bromides of the self-help movement as a remedy for overheated passions, but today her delivery of the articles of her faith was flat, like that of an acolyte who had suddenly become an unbeliever. She looked at us with unseeing eyes. When her glance fell on Rosalie Norman, she appeared to find her focus again. “We have to keep on keeping on. Continuance is the answer,” she said. “Rosalie will need some help getting her gifts back to the office.”

Grateful for direction on a day that seemed suddenly to have broken from its moorings, people headed for the door. Ed Mariani scooped up an armload of pastel-wrapped presents. As he passed by me, he whispered, “At least we were spared a shower of healing stones from Livia’s enchanted ritual bag.” He sighed heavily. “Truth be told, I wouldn’t mind having a hunk of rose quartz to clutch right now.”

“I forget what rose quartz is supposed to do,” I said.

“Heal the heart.” Ed looked over at Solange. “If I had a piece, I’d share it with her, except I imagine that at this moment she isn’t making exceptions for gay men.”

“I’ll talk to her,” I said.

Ed gave me a quick peck on the cheek. “Good luck.”

Solange was facing the window again, wreathed in cigarette smoke, which seemed to isolate her private and terrible mourning. I walked over and touched her shoulder.

She turned, and the breath caught in my throat. She was transformed. Her face was ashen and carved with the lines of bitterness that mark those who have seen the worst and know there is nothing better ahead.

“Solange, is there anything I can do to help?”

“It depends.” She stubbed out her cigarette on a dessert plate that had been abandoned on the windowsill. “Can you raise the dead, Joanne?”

She ran from the room, and I made no attempt to follow her. When I felt Howard Dowhanuik’s arm around my shoulder, I relaxed into it. We walked downstairs in silence. Instead of turning in to the glassed-in walkway that connected College West to the Lab and Classroom buildings, Howard headed for the doors that led outside. “Let’s take the long way back to the office,” he said. “I need to figure out how I’m going to break this to my son.”