Gail Bowen - The Endless Knot

“Not much yet,” she said. “Kathryn Morrissey was killed with …” Rapti squinted at her notepad. “I can’t make out my own writing, but they were some sort of Chinese carved figures.”

“Baku,” I said. “She owned a pair of them. They’re supposed to capture bad dreams.”

“They weren’t on the job last night,” Rapti said tartly. She stared at me. “Trade you places. I need the computer.” We switched and Rapti, an effortless multi-tasker, began typing up her notes and filling me in. “From what we’ve heard,” she said, “Kathryn Morrissey’s death was horrific. Her murderer used the baku to bludgeon her to death.”

I swallowed hard. “Any idea who did it?”

“Not so far. Kathryn Morrissey’s son found her this morning.” Rapti checked her notes. “He’s thirteen years old.”

I shuddered. “Imagine finding your mother like that. He’ll never get over it.”

“I guess not,” Rapti said. “We’re trying to track him down, but he seems to have been invisible.”

“Try the neighbourhood schools,” I said. “If he is thirteen, he has to be enrolled somewhere.”

“Good thinking,” Rapti said. She tapped into the Regina school listings. “Boy, who knew there were this many schools in Regina?”

“You can eliminate most of them,” I said. “Given where Kathryn Morrissey lived, the logical possibilities are Pope Pius XII and Lakeview.”

“Eeny, meeny, miny, moe, I choose Pius XII,” Rapti said. She aimed a perfectly manicured nail at the keypad of her telephone and tapped in the number on the screen. When her call was answered, she gave me a thumbs-up sign. “This is Rapti Lustig from NationTV,” she said “Do you have a student there by the name of Ethan Morrissey. He’s thirteen. Thank you, I’ll hold.”

“Ethan,” I repeated, and my chest was heavy with the burden of information I didn’t want to carry. “And you say he’s thirteen?”

Rapti heard the apprehension in my voice. Her eyes darted from her computer screen to me. “Something you can contribute?” she asked.

“He’s not at Pius XII,” I said. “He’s at Lakeview. The surname isn’t Morrissey, it’s Thorpe.”

Rapti’s eyes blazed with interest. “Anything more?”

“He’s a friend of Taylor’s,” I said.

“Let me phone Lakeview,” Rapti said. I sat down while she made the inquiry.

Suddenly, it was too much, the covered body on the gurney, the baku, the fragile vulnerable boy finding his mother. “Rapti, I’ve got to get out of here. I’m feeling sick.”

“Hang on, Jo,” said Rapti. “The police have found him. They’re taking him to his dad’s.”

Somewhat relieved, I stood up and left while Rapti was thanking someone at Lakeview for their courtesy. I took a cab to the new house. Zack was in the living room hard at work on his notes.

He beamed when I came into the room. “Perfect timing. There are decisions to be made, and I don’t want to make them alone.”

I didn’t respond. Zack moved closer to me. “What’s wrong?”

“Everything,” I said.

For the next fifteen minutes, I sat on the floor, and Zack stroked my hair and offered comfort as I related what seemed increasingly to be a nightmare. “I don’t know what to do next,” I said finally.

“Sure you do,” he said. “Find out the truth. The only thing worse than knowing is not knowing.”

I pushed myself to my feet. “So I guess my move is to go to Charlie’s and tell him that, despite the fact that a woman he hated was murdered and he may or may not have been in the neighbourhood at the time, he has nothing to worry about.”

Zack raised his eyebrows. “That ought to start the ball rolling,” he said.

Charlie’s house was in the city’s core, nestled between a pawn shop and a building that had once been an adult video store but now sold discount bridal gowns. Only a bride who was a retail addict or suicidal would have ventured into that neighbourhood after dark, but the 1930s bungalow that Charlie tenderly restored for a woman he had loved and lost was an oasis of sweet innocence. With its Devonshire cream clapboard, dark green louvred shutters, and lace curtains, the house evoked a time when people left their doors unlocked and visited with neighbours on soft summer nights. It was a welcoming place, but that afternoon my only greeting was from Pantera, who was body-slamming the door in his eagerness to see who was on the other side.

I’d given up and started back down the walk by the time Charlie finally came to see what was going on. When he called my name, I turned and saw that he wasn’t alone. Peter and Mieka were standing behind him in the shadowy hall. Faced with a stranger at the gates, my children and Charlie had obviously decided to present a united front.

Pantera’s tail-wagging was manic, but nobody else seemed glad to see me. As the silence grew awkward, I waded in. “So what’s going on, Mieka,” I said. “I thought you were going back to Saskatoon this morning.”

Pete, always the peacemaker, took over. “Mum, this isn’t a good time for you to be here.”

“It’s not a good time for you to be here either,” I said. “Shouldn’t you be at the clinic?”

His face flushed with embarrassment. Pete and I had always been close; shutting me out was hard for him. “We just have a couple of things to work out,” he said miserably.

I stood my ground. “I have something to work out too,” I said. “Charlie, this morning your dad called Zack because he needed a lawyer. We were at your father’s condo when the EMS workers took out Kathryn Morrissey’s body. It wasn’t a great way to start the day, and the situation isn’t going to get any better. I think we need to sit down and talk about what happened last night.”

No one offered me a chair; in fact, no one even budged. The signals were clear: any conversation we had would be brief and tense. For a few moments we faced one another in uneasy silence. “So is Zack Howard’s lawyer?” Mieka asked finally. Her hand had been resting on Charlie’s upper arm. Now it slid down until her fingers found his.

I tried to ignore the intimacy. “No,” I said. “Zack didn’t feel he was the best choice, but he did introduce Howard to someone else.”

Charlie’s voice was cold. “Why does my father need a lawyer?”

“I don’t know. But he did ask me to deliver a message to you. He said, ‘Tell Charlie that everything will be okay.’ ”

Mieka and Peter exchanged glances.

“Anybody care to fill me in?”

“Sometimes there are things it’s best not to know,” Pete said. “There was some confusion last night – can’t we let it go at that?”

“Pete, a woman was murdered.”

Charlie stepped closer. “We were together all night.”

“The three of you? Am I supposed to believe that Mieka left her kids on Halloween so she could stay up with you and her brother eating popcorn and watching horror movies?”

“It wasn’t the three of us, Mum,” Mieka said quietly. “Pete had an emergency at the clinic. It was just Charlie and me.”

“All night?”

“All night,” she said.

“But, Mieka, if you were asleep in a different room …”

“I wasn’t in a different room, Mum. I was with Charlie.” She looked away. “I’m sorry, Mum.”

“I’m not the one you need to apologize to,” I said. I peered into my purse, found Margot’s card, and handed it to Charlie. “This is the number of your father’s lawyer. Call her or don’t call her. Your choice.”

When I left, nobody waved goodbye.

Driving home, I made a conscious effort not to think about anything beyond the consolations of a hot shower, warm pyjamas, and a long nap. Half an hour later, clean and in my favourite flannelettes, I thought sleep would be possible, but I was wrong. The photographs of Mieka, Greg, and the girls on my nightstand were impossible to ignore, and I was still staring at the ceiling when I heard Taylor come home from school. I pulled on my jeans and sweater and went down to meet her.