Gail Bowen: Burying Ariel

It was a witty piece, executed deftly. Taylor came by the skill naturally. Her birth mother was the artist Sally Love, and her grandfather was Desmond Love, a man whose name appeared on most art historians’ millennial lists of significant makers of art in Canada. From the moment she could grasp a pencil, Taylor had demonstrated an extraordinary mastery of technique, but her art teacher had pointed me to Taylor’s real talent by quoting Marcel Duchamp. “A technique can be learned, but you can’t learn to have an original imagination.” At seven, Taylor was already impatient with the accessible and fascinated by unexplored territory.

As we headed south on Albert Street towards Ed’s, it was apparent my daughter was wired about the weekend ahead. “The minute we get there, I’m going swimming.” She darted a glance my way, and headed off the objection she saw coming. “I don’t care how cold it is. And after my swim, I’m going to make a little bed on the floor next to mine, so Madeleine can sleep beside me. Angus says Saturday night there’ll be fireworks and I’m going to hold her so she won’t be scared, and Eli says maybe he can build a bonfire and we can have a weenie roast. It’s going to be so awesome -” She stopped in mid-flight. “I mean it’s going to be really interesting.”

I turned to her. “What happened to ‘awesome’?” I asked.

“Ms. Cousin says if we use a word too often, it stops meaning anything. She says if we use the word ‘awesome’ when we talk about an ice cream cone, we won’t have a good word to use when we see the pyramids at Giza.”

“Ms. Cousin deserves the Governor General’s Award,” I said. “But you may not have to wait for Cheops to see something awesome. Ed tells me he and Barry have a nightingale.”

“A nightingale?” Her eyes were wide. “Just flying around?”

“I don’t think so. I think they have an aviary – that’s a really big cage.”

“I’m glad it’s big,” she said. “It wouldn’t be any good being a bird if you couldn’t fly around.”

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.”