Gail Bowen: The Endless Knot

ACCLAIM FOR GAIL BOWEN AND

THE JOANNE KILBOURN MYSTERIES

“Bowen is one of those rare, magical mystery writers readers love not only for her suspense skills but for her stories’ elegance, sense of place and true-to-life form.… A master of ramping up suspense.”

– Ottawa Citizen

“Bowen can confidently place her series beside any other being produced in North America.”

– Halifax Chronicle-Herald

“Gail Bowen’s Joanne Kilbourn mysteries are small works of elegance that assume the reader of suspense is after more than blood and guts, that she is looking for the meaning behind a life lived and a life taken.”

– Calgary Herald

“Bowen has a hard eye for the way human ambition can take advantage of human gullibility.”

– Publishers Weekly

“Gail Bowen got the recipe right with her series on Joanne Kilbourn.”

– Vancouver Sun

“What works so well [is Bowen’s] sense of place – Regina comes to life – and her ability to inhabit the everyday life of an interesting family with wit and vigour.… Gail Bowen continues to be a fine mystery writer, with a protagonist readers can invest in for the long run.”

– National Post

“Gail Bowen is one of Canada’s literary treasures.”

– Ottawa Citizen

OTHER JOANNE KILBOURN MYSTERIES

BY GAIL BOWENThe Nesting Dolls

The Brutal Heart

The Last Good Day

The Glass Coffin

Burying Ariel

Verdict in Blood

A Killing Spring

A Colder Kind of Death

The Wandering Soul Murders

Murder at the Mendel

Deadly Appearances

Copyright © 2006 by Gail Bowen

First M&S paperback edition published 2007

This edition published 2011

All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,

photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian

Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Bowen, Gail, 1942-

The endless knot : a Joanne Kilbourn mystery / Gail Bowen.

eISBN: 978-1-55199-246-4

I. Title.

PS8553.08995E54 2011 C813′.54 C2011-900313-9

We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.

Published simultaneously in the United States of America by

McClelland & Stewart Ltd., P.O. Box 1030, Plattsburgh, New York 12901

Library of Congress Control Number: 2011925598

Cover image © Blair Witch | Dreamstime.com

McClelland & Stewart Ltd.

75 Sherbourne Street

Toronto, Ontario

M5A 2P9

www.mcclelland.com

v3.1

To James Henry Cook ,

a truly good and generous man ,

and to his great-nephews ,

Jess Benjamin Bowen-Bell and Peyton Benjamin Bowen

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks to Jan Seibel for her solid legal advice, to Dinah Forbes for her sensitive and perceptive editing, to Joan Baldwin, the model of a family physician, and as always to Ted, who makes everything possible.

ContentsCoverOther Books by This AuthorTitle PageCopyrightDedicationAcknowledgements Chapter 1Chapter 2Chapter 3Chapter 4Chapter 5Chapter 6Chapter 7Chapter 8Chapter 9Chapter 10Chapter 11Chapter 12Chapter 13Chapter 14Chapter 15 About the Author

CHAPTER

1

As I bent down to cut the last of our marigolds on the Friday before Thanksgiving, I was as happy as I could remember being. The stems of the flowers were cool against my fingers, and their sturdy beauty and acrid scent evoked memories of marigolds hastily picked by my kids and carried off, stems sheathed in wax paper and anchored by elastic bands, to be given to a teacher or abandoned on the playground. It was a morning for remembering, as filled with colour and ancient mystery as a Breugel painting. Above me, skeins of geese zigzagged into alignment against the cobalt sky. The high clear air rang with their cries. A north wind, urgent with change, lifted the branches of our cottonwood tree, shaking the leaves loose and splashing the lawn with gold. Beneath my feet last week’s fallen leaves, bronze and fragile as papyrus, crackled into the cold earth.

For the first time in a long time, there was nowhere I had to be. I was on sabbatical, expanding an article I’d written about the emerging values war in Canada into a book. It was an open-ended project that I found easy to pick up and easier to put down. My three grown children were living independent lives marked by the usual hurdles but filled with promise. They were all strong and sensible people, so I crossed my fingers, enjoyed their company, and prayed that the choices they made would bring them joy. Since my son, Angus, had enrolled in the College of Law in Saskatoon the month before, my younger daughter and I had been alone in our house. We missed Angus, but Taylor was just about to turn eleven, and the world was opening up to her. Listening as she spun the gossamer of unexplored possibilities was a delight neither of us ever wearied of.

Freed from the tyranny of a timetable, I read books I’d been meaning to read, gazed at art with an unhurried eye, listened to music I loved, and revelled in the quiet pleasures of the season Keats celebrated for its mist and mellow fruitfulness.

Best of all, there was a new man. His name was Zachary Shreve and he’d brought with him a piercing happiness I’d forgotten existed. But I had just celebrated a birthday. I was fifty-six and as I walked back into the house, my joy was edged with autumn’s knowledge that nothing gold can stay.

The kitchen phone was ringing. I dropped the marigolds in the sink and picked up, expecting to hear Zack’s voice. For the last eight weeks he’d been putting in twelve-hour days – first on a case involving the death of a homeless man who had the bad luck to seek shelter in a warehouse on the night the warehouse owner set his property on fire, and now on a high-profile case of attempted murder. Zack called often – mostly just to talk but, if we were lucky, to arrange time together. My caller wasn’t the man I loved. It was my old friend, Jill Oziowy, who, after a heady New York experience, had decided to return to the relative sanity of Toronto and her old job as producer of NationTv’s Canada Tonight . As always, Jill didn’t waste time on preamble.

“How would you like to go once more into the breach for NationTV?”

I cradled the phone between my shoulder and ear, picked up the vase on the counter and started filling it with water. “Not a chance,” I said.

“At least hear me out,” Jill said. “The heir apparent to the anchor job here got picked up last night for having sex with some underage admirers.”

“And you want me to talk to him about keeping it zipped.”

“No, I want you to replace him as Canada Tonight’s eye on the Sam Parker trial.”