Gail Bowen - Burying Ariel

“There may not be,” I said, “but if there is, Maryse Bergman may be able to shed light on the connection. Will you give me her number?”

“Sure,” he said. “But if you were of a mind to, you could hop in your car and be talking to her face to face in less than an hour. When her studies didn’t work out here, Maryse moved back to Saskatchewan. She works on the front desk at the Big Sky Motel in Moose Jaw.”

I thanked Tom, rang off, then dialled the number he had given me. My call was picked up on the first ring. I was obviously dealing with a five-star establishment.

“Big Sky Inn,” a male voice said, “Kelly speaking. How may I help you?”

“I’d like to speak to Maryse Bergman, please. She’s an employee.”

“Maryse is no longer with us.”

“As of when?”

“As of this morning. She walked off in the middle of her shift without a word of explanation to anybody.”

“Do you have a home number for her?”

“It’s against company policy to give out the phone numbers of employees.”

“But she’s no longer an employee.”

He laughed. “You’ve got me there, ma’am. Hold on.”

He gave me the number, but when I dialled, all I got was Maryse’s voice mail telling me that she’d been forced to relocate and her friends would hear from her soon.

Too restless to work, I headed for the cafe in the Lab Building where Ann Vogel and her group hung out. It was empty, and the metal accordion screens had been pulled across the serving area. It seemed everyone but I had left for the weekend. I’d started back to my office when I heard someone call my name. I turned and saw Kristy Stevenson, the archivist who had sung at the vigil for Ariel.

“Have you got a few minutes?” she asked. She was wearing a lavender-blue silk blouse; the colour matched her eyes, but her oval face was pale and miserable. “I hate this Friends of Red Riding Hood stuff,” she said. “I keep thinking of the lines from that song by Beowulf’s Daughters that you used in your talk.”

“Darkness is our womb and destination, Light, a heartbeat glory, gone too soon,” I said.

“Well, no one at this march has any interest in turning back darkness. Ann Vogel and her gang are getting ready in the library quadrangle, and it makes me sick.” Kristy bit her lip in frustration. “Joanne, I’ve loved libraries since I was a little kid. That’s why I chose to be an archivist, making certain that all the pieces of the puzzle were there for anyone who was seeking answers.”

“People like Ann Vogel don’t need archives,” I said. “They don’t even need libraries. They already have the answers.”

Kristy’s eyes flashed with anger. “You bet they do. Simplistic ones. Women who don’t share their views are bad; books that don’t reflect their philosophy are bad; art that doesn’t mirror their reality is bad; literature that doesn’t tell their story is bad. Why would they need a library?”

We had reached the glass doors that opened onto the quad. Outside, perhaps a dozen women were working on placards: attaching wooden pickets to poster-board, filling the blank faces of the signs with words or with painted sunflowers or ferocious cartoon wolves. The finished placards were propped against a low wall to dry, and their messages were designed to foment: NEVER FORGET; WOLVES BELONG IN CAGES; ARIEL WARREN – THE BEST AND BRIGHTEST; REAL MEN DON’T KILL; REVENGE THE RED RIDING HOODS; MURDERERS DESERVE WHAT THEY GET.

“There seems to be a certain lack of focus,” Kristy said dryly.

“No lack of firepower, though,” I said. “I’m going to go out and ask them to tone down the rhetoric.”

Ann Vogel was on her knees stapling rectangles of poster-board back to back. Despite her falling-out with Solange, Ann appeared to be sticking to the combat look: head-to-toe black, and hennaed hair shirred to a buzz cut. When she recognized me, she stood and waved her staple gun in mock menace. “You’re not wanted here,” she said.

“That makes us even, because I don’t want to be here,” I said. “So I’ll just ask one quick question. What if you’re wrong about Charlie, too?”

Ann narrowed her eyes. “What else was I wrong about?”

“Kevin Coyle,” I said. “I talked to Tom Bradley, he’s the head of…”

“I know who Tom Bradley is,” Ann snapped.

“Good. So you’ll know that, while the idea of a trustworthy man may be an oxymoron to you, it’s not to a lot of other people. When Tom says that Ben Jesse believed the charges Maryse Bergman made against Kevin were false, I believe him. Other people will, too.”

Ann tilted her chin defiantly. “Kevin Coyle deserved what he got,” she said. “He’s unfair to women. He marks us too hard. He’s dismissive of the answers we give in class.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Ann. Kevin’s unfair to everybody,” I said. “He marks everybody hard, and he’s dismissive of everybody. That doesn’t make it right, but that’s the truth. He’s an anachronism. When I was an undergraduate, the universities were full of profs like that.”

“We don’t have to take that kind of crap from men any more.”

“I know,” I said, “and amen to that. But I still don’t get it. Why did you target Kevin? He’s rude, he’s abrupt, he’s probably misanthropic. But he’s not a misogynist. Why did you get Maryse Bergman to lie about him? Why did you go after him?”

“You never get the point, do you?” She looked around to check if anyone was in hearing range, then she lowered her voice. “We needed an example. If we showed how bad he was, everybody would see that we needed women in the department.”

“There were women in the department,” I said.

“Women like you,” she said. “Women who were no better than men. Look at what happened yesterday. You’re given the honour of going to a funeral for a Red Riding Hood.”

“For Ariel Warren,” I corrected her quietly.

“Whatever. But when Ariel’s killer crashes the party with his father, you just leave with the men. Now you tell me, what does that make you?”

“A loyal friend?” I said.

“A traitor,” she said. “Not just to Ariel but to all women, and no matter what Maryse is saying now, what we did then was for all women. Our department needed gender parity.”

“And that was worth risking a man’s career?”

“It was worth everything,” she said.

“ ‘The last temptation is the greatest treason: to do the wrong deed for the right reason,’ ” I said.

She looked at me sharply. “What?”

“Solange has defected from your group, hasn’t she?”

“She had issues,” Ann said coldly. “And I have signs to make, so if you’ll excuse me…”

“I’ll excuse you,” I said. “But I won’t forgive you.”

She stepped close to me and placed the staple gun so that the business end was flat against my cheek. “Go fuck yourself,” she said. Then she turned on her heel, strode over to a stack of placards, and began stapling them to pickets.

Very scary. As I walked back into the library, I thought with gratitude of the solid complement of police officers who would be accompanying Ann on the march and who were charged with the duty of keeping her and the other Friends of Red Riding Hood from discovering just how scary they could be.

Taylor and Bruce and Benny were waiting for me on the front step when I got home. Taylor had a new skipping rope, and she was making a lazy crack-the-whip movement with it through the grass so the cats could chase its iridescent rainbow handle. All three were blissed out, and I thought, not for the first time, that being a cat must be one of the alltime great gigs.

Taylor held out the rope to show me. “I got this for helping with garbage patrol.”