Burying Ariel

Gail Bowen
CHAPTER
1

The nails on the fingers that reached out to grab my arm as I left the Faculty Club’s private dining room were bitten to the quick, and the cuticles were chewed raw. The hand belonged to a man whose rage was so fierce he had taken to ripping his own body, but it had become as familiar to me as my own. It was ten minutes to one on the Thursday afternoon before the Victoria Day weekend. The celebration of the old Queen’s birthday may have been a signal to the rest of Canada to unbutton and unwind, but Kevin Coyle’s private demons didn’t take holidays.

“I thought I was going to have to go in there and get you,” he said. “I have news.”

“Kevin, there’s a celebration going on, remember? Today’s the luncheon for Rosalie.”

Behind the Coke-bottle lenses of his horn-rims, his eyes glittered. “Does a party for an old maid who’s finally managed to snag herself a man take precedence over murder?”

By his own assessment, my former colleague in the Political Science department hadn’t drawn a wholly rational breath since a group of female students had accused him of attitudinal harassment two years earlier. I removed his hand from my arm. “Put a sock in it, Kevin. It’s a holiday weekend. I’m declaring a moratorium on tortured metaphors. I don’t want to hear how your reputation as a gentleman and a scholar has been murdered.”

He shook his head. “This murder is no metaphor, Joanne. It’s real, and I’m certain it’s connected to my case. A young man from the library just came up to the Political Science office. He’d been sent to find Livia. Of course, our esteemed head wasn’t there; nor were any of the rest of you. As usual, I was alone, so he delivered the news to me.”

“And the news is…?”

“A woman’s body has been found in an archive room in the basement of the library.”

I felt my nerves twang. “Was she a student of ours? Is that why the man was looking for Livia?”

Kevin took off his glasses. I’d never seen him without them. He looked surprisingly vulnerable. “Not a student, Joanne. A colleague. It was Ariel Warren.”

For a moment, I clung to the grace of denial. “No! I just saw her this morning. She was wearing that vintage band jacket she bought to wear to Rosalie’s party.”

“The jacket didn’t protect her,” Kevin said flatly. “I wish it had.” He swallowed hard, as if empathy were an emotion that had to be choked back. “Our profession is a cesspool, but she was a decent young woman.”

Kevin’s reference to Ariel in the past tense had the finality of a tolling bell. I felt my knees go weak. “She was only twenty-seven,” I said.

“Too young to die,” he agreed.

On the other side of the door, there was a burst of laughter. I closed my eyes. I’d known Ariel Warren since she was a child. My first memory of her was at a Halloween party we’d had for my daughter Mieka’s sixth birthday. Ariel had come as a sunflower, with a circle of golden petals radiating from her small face.

“There could be a mistake,” I said, but my voice was forlorn, bereft of hope.

Kevin put his glasses back on and peered at me. “Are you going to cry?”

“Not yet,” I said. “Right now, I’m going over to the library to see what I can find out.” I looked hard at him. “Kevin, I don’t think either of us should say anything more until we’re sure we know the truth.”

His laugh was a bark of derision. “The truth. You’ll never find out the truth about this. Mark my words. They’ll cover up the connection between this death and my case the way they’ve covered up everything else. Either that, or they’ll rearrange the facts to implicate me.”

On a good day I could pity Kevin, but this was not a good day. I had to struggle to keep my composure. “Try to look at this the way a person with an ounce of decency would,” I said. “Someone has been murdered. This isn’t about you.”

“That’s where you’re wrong,” Kevin said. “Ariel wouldn’t be in our department if it weren’t for me. And I know for a fact that she’d unearthed something that would exonerate me.”

“Exactly what had she ‘unearthed’?”

He shrugged helplessly. “They killed her before she had a chance to reveal what she’d found. That little coven that set me up will stop at nothing.” He patted my arm. “Tread carefully. I had only three friends in this department, and now it appears that two of them are dead.”

As I watched him disappear down the stairs, I felt the first stirrings of panic. Kevin might be obsessive, but there was nothing wrong with his math. When the charges against him had surfaced, I was one of two people in Political Science who had sided with Kevin Coyle; the other had been Ben Jesse, our department head. Ben was a thoroughly decent man who feared unsubstantiated complaints, however serious, more than confrontation and nasty publicity. It was an ugly time for our department and for our university; it pitted us against one another and ended longstanding friendships. A man governed by expedience would have thrown Kevin to the wolves, but Ben was a person of principle. He defended Kevin because he believed in fairness and due process. His refusal to cave in to political bullying cost him dearly. In the midst of a lengthy and rancorous encounter with a group of students, Ben suffered a heart attack. He was, they told us later, dead before he hit the floor.

Now there was another death.

I reached the library just as a half-dozen police officers were coming through the door from outside. I was in luck; one of the officers was Detective Robert Hallam, the fiance of Rosalie Norman, our department’s administrative assistant and guest of honour at our luncheon that day.

Robert was a small, dapper man with a choleric temperament and an unshakeable belief that the world was divided into two camps: the good guys and the bad guys. I was both a friend of his beloved and a woman who had chosen a cop for her own beloved, so I had made the cut. In Robert’s estimation, I was one of the good guys, and as soon as he spotted me, he came over.

“You’ve heard about this already?”

“News travels fast at a university,” I said. “I need a favour. Can you tell me the name of the woman who was killed?”

He shook his head. “I just got the call.” Robert scanned the lobby, then pointed to a man in a grey windbreaker who was taking photographs of the area around the elevator. “Eddie will have some answers,” he said. Robert walked over to the elevators. He and Eddie exchanged a few words; then Eddie handed him some pictures. Robert shuffled through them and came back to me.

“The identification in the dead woman’s wallet belongs to Ariel Warren,” he said. “The deceased died as a result of a knife in the back. One wound, but it was a doozy. We’ve already sent someone to talk to the next of kin.”

“Are those photographs of Ariel?” I asked.

“They’re of the dead woman,” he said. “I never had the pleasure, so I can’t say for certain that Ariel Warren is the woman in the pictures.”

“Could I see them?”

He hesitated. “They’re graphic, but there’s one that’s not too bad.” He shuffled through the photos again, then held up a Polaroid. My throat tightened: the dark blond hair of the woman slumped on the table had fallen forward, but I could see the curve of her cheek and the shoulder of the scarlet band jacket she’d chosen to celebrate Rosalie’s joy.

“It’s her,” I said.

Robert Hallam’s face was grim. “I figured it was,” he said. “But when the deceased is a friend of a friend, you always hope you’re wrong. My Rosalie was very fond of that girl.”

A thought occurred to me. “Rosalie still doesn’t know. None of them do. Robert, is it all right if I go back and tell them what’s happened, before the media get the story?”

“You can tell them. Nobody should find out news like this from some jerk with a microphone.”

“I agree,” I said. “This is going to be tough enough. Ariel had a lot of friends in our department.”

“I’m sure she did.” Robert looked thoughtful. “Joanne, tell people to stick around, would you? We’ll need to talk to everybody who knew Ariel. She may have had a lot of friends, but she obviously had at least one enemy.”

By the time I got back, the main dining room of the Faculty Club was deserted. The regular term was over, and people who taught in the spring session didn’t tend to hang around past lunch. The door to the private dining room was still closed, but I could hear the stereo. During lunch, we had listened to show tunes about love and marriage. Ed Mariani, with whom I co-taught the class Politics and the Media, had made the selections, and they ranged from the sublime to the sappy. Now it was Stanley Holloway singing “Get Me to the Church on Time,” and our ex-premier and newest department member, Howard Dowhanuik, was singing along in his tuneless, rumbling bass.

I looked at my watch. It was ten past one. Four and a half hours earlier Ariel had been alive. Not just living, but triumphantly alive. For much of the winter, she had looked thin and unwell, but when I’d seen her as I headed for my office that morning she had been radiant. She’d been sitting on the academic green surrounded by the students from her Political Science 101 class. It had been a scene for an Impressionist: a high, blue sky, air shimmering with light, new grass splashed by crayon-bright plantings of daffodils and tulips, and in the foreground, a woman wearing a brilliant scarlet jacket, her dark blond hair knotted loosely at the nape of her neck, her profile gravely beautiful as she listened to the earnest voices of a freshman class. When Ariel had called out a greeting, I’d felt a current of connection, not just with her, but with what it had been like to be twenty-seven on a soft spring day, doing work that I knew I was good at and looking forward to a future of illimitable possibilities.

There would be no more of those incandescent moments. Had anyone asked me that morning, I would have sworn that all of Ariel’s colleagues would have felt her loss as keenly as I did. Now I wasn’t sure. Kevin Coyle’s accusation had brought only a pinprick of doubt. Since the advent of his case, Kevin had floated a hundred wacko theories. His claims were easy to dismiss; Detective Robert Hallam’s observation wasn’t. Suddenly, I was in uncharted territory. The only thing I knew for certain was that for two people at Rosalie Norman’s luncheon, the loss would be personal and profound.

Howard Dowhanuik’s son, Charlie, and Ariel had been lovers. To the outside world, it seemed an unlikely pairing. Charlie, with characteristic edge, referred to their relationship as the non-Disney version of Beauty and the Beast. The allusion was cruel but not inaccurate. Ariel had the kind of delicately sculpted porcelain beauty found most often in illustrations to fairy stories. Charlie’s face caused strangers to avert their eyes. He had been born with a port-wine birthmark that covered the right half of his face like a blood mask, and it had made his passage through childhood and adolescence an agony. Charlie’s pain hadn’t been eased by Howard’s total absorption in politics or by the spotlight that shone on the premier’s family in our small province. Through courage and a quick and acerbic wit, Charlie had made a life for himself, but until recently there had been no room in that life for his father. Loving Ariel and being loved by her had made Charlie generous. He had, at her urging, given Howard a second chance, and Howard had been humbly grateful.

The other person to whom I dreaded breaking the news was the young instructor who had been hired with Ariel. Solange Levy was a difficult young woman, sensitive to slight and quick to anger. When she had arrived at our department to teach the previous September, the irony of her given name had been hard to ignore, but as her personal history became known to us, it was apparent that nothing in Solange’s life had given her cause to be sunny. The only child of a mother involved in a series of abusive relationships, Solange learned to take refuge in her studies. She had a gift for mathematics, and by the time she was in high school she’d decided that, in an uncertain world, a discipline that put a premium on reason and elegant proofs could offer her safe haven.

On a snowy December day in 1989, she had been doing her homework and listening to the radio when she heard the news of the massacre at L’Ecole Polytechnique. She was seventeen at the time. The event politicized her and defined her life. She abandoned mathematics and plunged into feminist theory and politics. Ten years later, she was a Ph. D. and a warrior. With her razor intellect, her sleek, muscular body, her Joan of Arc haircut, and her uniform of black T-shirt, black jeans, and ragged Converse high-top runners, Solange seemed more equipped for battle than friendship, but Ariel pierced her armour. The price Ariel’s death would exact from her best friend’s vision of human existence seemed beyond calculation.

When I opened the door to the Window Room, it was clear that Rosalie Norman’s party had reached the sour stage of an event that had gone on too long. The Asti Spumante bottles were empty, the delicate Depression-ware glass plates were cake-smeared, and the pink-throated flowers that had decorated each of our places had begun to wilt. Fully a third of the guests had left, and those who remained were sprawled listlessly in their chairs. Behind her mound of gifts, Rosalie Norman had the fixed smile of the guest of honour at a party that has ceased to be fun. As all eyes turned to me, I remembered my reason for leaving the party. I’d been charged with the task of picking up the bouquet of long-stemmed roses that had been delivered to the Faculty Club bar. The flowers were the final gift. As soon as Rosalie had them in hand, the last photograph would be taken, and we would be free to get back to our real lives.

Livia Brook cut a quick stare my way. “Where are the roses?” In the years since her husband had dumped her, Livia had meditated and soul-journeyed her way into a seemingly shatterproof serenity, but at that moment negative energies seemed to be getting the better of her. She tried to erase her rudeness. “We were beginning to be concerned about you.”

Solange gave me a sly sidelong glance. “My theory was that you’d run off with your friend, Kevin Coyle. Not my type, but who could blame you for giving in to temptation?” She leaned back in her chair and raised a toned arm to indicate the decorations. “Such a romantic occasion. I was afraid this event would be quitaine.” She struggled for the translation. “You know, kitschy – too much – but it was quite lovely. I just wish Ariel had shown up.”

I took a step towards her. “Solange…”

Her face froze. She had cat’s eyes, tawny and green-flecked, and she had a cat’s instinct for danger. She knew the worst before I opened my mouth.

“Something’s happened to her,” she said flatly.

I nodded. “Yes.”

Solange moved out of her chair slowly, like someone in a dream state. “She’s dead?”

“Her body was found in an archive room in the basement of the library.”

“When?” Solange said.

“Not long ago,” I said. “Probably within the hour.”

Solange covered her face with her hands and turned away, but the other guests had moved to the edge of their chairs. Like clever undergraduates, they were twitching with unasked questions.

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.”

“The newsroom at Charlie’s station will be getting the story soon. They may have it already,” I said. “You don’t have much time.”

When he turned to face me, Howard’s eyes were rheumy. “My grandmother used to say, ‘There’s this life, the next life, and a turnip patch on the other side.’ ”

“Not much there to cling to when times get rough,” I said.

Howard shrugged. “Have you got anything better?”

As we approached the grassy slope where I’d seen Ariel and her class that morning, I had to admit I didn’t. At that moment, it was hard to envision a future that contained anything but pain. The University Day Care Centre was nearby, and the staff had liberated their preschoolers to take advantage of a five-star spring day. Wild with freedom, the children ran and somersaulted down the little hill, a kaleidoscopic, perpetually moving swirl of fluorescent wind-breakers and new sneakers. As they called out one another’s names in voices bright as May sunshine, I remembered other voices, other children.

Ariel had been a golden child, tow-headed, cobalt-eyed, long-limbed. From the moment she came through the front door for Mieka’s party, she had been surrounded by other children. Charlie Dowhanuik had spent much of the party on the edge of the fun, watching intently, his small fingers splayed against his cheek, trying without success to cover the purple birthmark that threatened to engulf his face. When I served the food, he squeezed in next to Ariel. She had reached up, pulled his hand down with her own, and peered at his face closely. “It’s not so bad,” she said, “but if I get the dime in the cake, I’ll give it to you.”

When Howard and I passed the closed door of Solange Levy’s office and heard weeping, Howard shot me a supplicating look.

“I’ll see if there’s anything I can do,” I said. “You call Charlie.”

Solange’s door was open a crack. I rapped on it. “Solange, it’s Joanne.”

“Are you alone?”

On the desk in front of her were her silver bicycle helmet and the lock to her prized Trek WSD, but Solange didn’t appear to be going anywhere. A cigarette smouldered between her fingers. She was holding a framed photograph in her hands. As I watched, she ripped the photo out, picked up a snapshot from her desk and slid it carefully into the pewter frame. “I have to protect this,” she said. “It’s of Ariel at Lake Magog. It was the first day of the New Year, and she was so happy. She’d always been so worried about other people’s happiness – so afraid to put her own wishes first.” Solange shook her head furiously. “So female and so destructive. But she found her strength on our hike at Mount Assiniboine. There were just the two of us. It was tough. There was a blizzard. There were places where the ascent was straight up the mountain. Once the path under her feet just gave way, but she held on.” Solange stared at the photograph. “All her life she’d had fears, but by the time we got to Lake Magog, she knew she’d never go back to being the compliant little girl. She had found her power.” Solange’s voice broke. “Then some bastard kills her as if she were an animal.” For a beat Solange herself seemed torn apart by the violence that ended her friend’s life; then she turned to steel. “He won’t get away with it.”

I followed her as she strode down the hall. There were three people in the main office: Detective Robert Hallam was watching Rosalie search the drawer of the cabinet where we kept personnel files, and Livia Brook was hovering between them like a duenna.

Solange paid them no heed. A counter separated the reception area from the office. When Solange set the photograph on it, Livia came over immediately. She picked up the picture, glanced at it quickly, then thrust it at Solange. “It’s too much,” she said. “We don’t need a reminder of what we’ve lost.”

“You’re wrong.” Solange’s tone was coldly furious. “We do need a reminder. We all need to be reminded every minute of every day that what that monster took from us was beyond price. Otherwise, there will never be justice.” Solange returned the photograph to the counter, but her fingers lingered, caressing the curve of the frame. “When I was young,” she said, “I was prepared for confirmation by a Spanish priest – a fat, useless old man, peddling cruel patriarchal dogma, but one of his lessons stayed with me. He told me there was a Spanish proverb I should remember whenever I had to make a choice in life.” Her voice deepened into a parody of the old priest, and she wagged her finger theatrically. “God says, ‘Take what you want. Take it, and pay for it .’ ” She turned to face me. “The man who killed Ariel took the best, Joanne, and if God won’t make him pay for it, I will.”