The Brutal Heart

CHAPTER 8

Zack had arranged to drive to the funeral with Blake, so I went alone. As my husband had predicted, parking wasn’t a problem, but I chose a place two blocks away because I needed a walk to cool down.

There were no mourners in sight, and when I opened the door to Speers, six people in the solemn garb of funeral-home employees leapt to attention. Obeying a choreography as perfectly executed as the movements in a kabuki dance, one of the employees took my umbrella, a second led me to the memorial book where a third opened a page, still blank, and handed me a pen. When I had written my name, a young man with a crewcut so short that his scalp peeked pinkly through, placed two fingers under my elbow, waited as another employee handed me a funeral program, then guided me past the gleaming empty pews to a seat in the second row behind the only other mourner in the room.

If I’d been quick, I would have said that my husband, who would be joining me, was in a wheelchair and that we’d be more comfortable sitting at the back, but the tensions of the morning had beaten me down. I sat where I was told to sit. When I murmured my thanks to the usher, the young woman ahead of me turned to stare.

Surprisingly, she giggled. “I might as well sit next to you, right? Or maybe you could sit next to me?” Her eyes took in the empty room. “I thought there’d be more people.” She looked back at me. “So will you? Sit with me, I mean? I’m Mandy Avilia – Cristal’s sister.”

I moved to the place beside her. At first I couldn’t detect a family resemblance. Cristal had been slight, doll-like, and ethereal. This young woman was unabashedly carnal. Her sleeveless black dress was cut low to showcase the peachy skin of her arms, throat, and breasts. Her shoulder-length hair was dark and springy with life, and her mouth was wide and sensual.

“Were you a friend of my sister’s?” she asked.

I thought of Blake. “A friend of a friend,” I said.

“Well, that’s nice,” Mandy said. She held the funeral program in front of me. “Do you like the picture I chose?” she asked. “When Cristal was little, the photographer in our town had a beautiful baby contest. Cristal won. The prize was a picture on her birthday every year till she turned sixteen.” Mandy gulped. “After she turned sixteen, Cristal still got her picture taken every year for her birthday. That’s the last one. I just love it.”

It was a professional photograph, soft-focused and romantic – the kind of portrait a girl might give to her lover or use to announce her engagement. Cristal’s hair was blonder and longer than it had been in the DVD with Zack. She’d grown out her bangs and added a soft wave that framed her heart-shaped face. A swath of ivory chiffon was draped around her bare shoulders. Her lips were slightly parted, but she wasn’t smiling. There was a private sadness about her. Underneath were the words Portrait of A Lady.

Out of nowhere I remembered the stillness and grace of Ned Osler’s apartment at the Balfour – how the fire had burned low as he and I talked. That was how Ned saw Cristal, that chameleon woman who could become any man’s fantasy.

“She was beautiful, wasn’t she?” Mandy said.

“Yes,” I agreed.

“That day when the man from the lawn service found her, she was holding a book called Portrait of a Lady. The police say the murderer must have put the book in her hands. Why would anybody do that?”

“I don’t know.”

Mandy turned her eyes to me. “There is so much I don’t understand. I loved my sister, but I never really knew her. I never knew what it was she wanted. When I saw the book, I thought maybe that was it.”

“To be a lady.”

Images of Cristal thrusting her body against Zack’s crowded my mind, and I turned away from Mandy’s large and trusting eyes.

There was a murmur of voices at the back of the room, and I saw Zack and Blake. Zack beckoned to me.

“The man in the wheelchair is my husband,” I said. “I should go back and sit with him.”

“There’s plenty of room in the aisle right beside me,” Mandy said. “I don’t want to sit alone.” That seemed to end the discussion.

I went back and bent close to my husband. “That’s Cristal’s sister. There’s no one to sit with her.”

Zack muttered an expletive under his breath, but he turned his wheelchair and came up the centre aisle. Blake followed. They positioned themselves so they were on either side of Mandy and me. The portrait of Cristal was on a table beside an urn whose purpose was unmistakable. A spray of purple cattleya orchids drifted between the portrait and the urn. When he took in the arrangement, Blake flinched, but he remained composed.

Zack leaned towards Mandy. “I’m Zack Shreve. I’m a lawyer. Your sister paid me to represent a homeless woman who’d run into some legal difficulties. It was an act of real kindness.”

Mandy’s eyes welled. “Cristal was a good person.” Blake held out his hand to Mandy. “She helped a lot of people.”

Mandy looked around. “Then why aren’t more people here?”

“I don’t know,” Blake said.

The funeral director who had led me to my seat came and reminded Mandy gently that it was two o’clock – time to begin the service.

“Could we wait five minutes?” she asked. “There might be other people.”

She was right, there were other people – four of them. The first two – an imposing woman in grey and a younger man with a powerful body that appeared to strain the seams of his black suit – arrived together. When I caught Zack’s attention, he mouthed the word cops. Francesca Pope required no identification. Her appearance at Cristal’s funeral seemed inevitable. Like a persistent and troubling image in a Fellini film, Francesca seemed destined to appear and reappear until her role in the drama became clear. The final mourner was a surprise to everyone but Mandy. Just as the first lugubrious notes of “Amazing Grace” filled the chapel, Margot Wright joined the party. She came straight to the front and took Mandy’s hands in hers.

The tears streamed down Mandy’s face, but she was beaming. “I knew if you could possibly make it, you’d be here,” she said.

Margot’s own eyes were welling. “Hey, Cristal was a Wadena girl, and Wadena girls stick together, right?”

Margot pulled a pocket pack of tissues from her bag. She took one and handed the pack to Mandy. Beside me, my husband was, for once, speechless.

The service was generic and mercifully short. The minister, who introduced himself as “the Reverend Kevin,” had an overbite and a gentle manner. When he offered the standard apology for “not having had the privilege to know Cristal in life,” Zack and I exchanged glances. The Reverend Kevin didn’t dwell on the specifics of Cristal’s life. He talked about the mystery of human existence – a topic with which no one could take issue – then he led us through the Twenty-third Psalm and the Lord’s Prayer. The service concluded with the children’s hymn “Jesus Loves Me.”

When the service was over, Francesca and the police vanished, Zack and Blake and I shook hands with Mandy Avilia, and Margot offered to take Mandy out for a drink. We walked outside together, then we went our separate ways. Blake went back to the office, and Zack and I got into my car to go home. As soon as we were inside the car, I exploded.

“Why weren’t there more people there?” I said.

Zack’s jaw was set. He was trying to control his anger. “Jesus, Jo, you’re not twelve years old. You know the answer to that.” He lowered his voice. “You’re not going to like this, but I’ve seen the DVDS that were sent to Cristal’s clients. She gave each of those men something they weren’t getting anywhere else.”

“Sex?”

“Intimacy. I know you think Cristal’s clients were self-indulgent pricks, but if you’d been at our house the other day, you might have a different opinion. Those men lost something precious, and they were grieving.”

“Privately,” I snapped. “Away from the prying eyes of their wives and children. Did it occur to any of them to do the hard work of finding intimacy in a real relationship? You know, the kind where you don’t pay to get your own way, where you ask the woman about her needs?”

“Let’s get out of here,” Zack said.

Dinner that night was a tense affair. After we’d cleared the table, and Taylor went to her room to do homework, Zack turned to me. “Do you want to go over and see the avocets?”

“It’ll be too muddy for your chair,” I said.

“Fuck it. If I get stuck, I get stuck. You can leave me there.”

I felt my throat close. “I’ll never leave you, Zack.”

He pulled his wheelchair closer to me. “Then why are we sitting here making each other miserable? Jo, we’re not kids. If there were an actuary here, do you know what she would say?”

“No.”

“She’d say, ‘Look at the numbers – they’ll give you an idea of how much time you have left together. Go and see the fucking avocets.’ ”

And so we put on our jackets and drove to the south side of the Broad Street Bridge. The slope that led down to the sandy shoreline was slick, and Zack needed help with his chair, but we made it. We found a spot where we could sit and watch the avocets and the willets and the sandpipers without intruding in their world. The heart of the city was five minutes away, but that cool, misty evening, the only noises we heard came from waves slapping against the sand and shorebirds going about the business of their lives.

For the first time since Cristal Avilia’s murder, we were at peace, and when Zack reached out and took my hand, I felt something broken in me slide back into place.

“It would be nice to stay here forever, wouldn’t it?” he said. “No phones. No problems. No fights.”

“Just us and the birds.” I said. I smiled at him. “You’d miss your martinis.”

“You’d miss the kids,” he said. “Actually, there’s a lot we’d miss. I think we’re going to have to face it, Ms. Shreve – becoming the bird people by the Broad Street Bridge may not be in our future.”

“We’ll have to figure something else out,” I said. I moved closer to him. “Do you remember what the dean said at our wedding?”

Zack nodded. “I remember everything about that day, Joanne. I remember everything about all our days. James said that marriage is a leap of faith, but we’d make it if we remembered to hold on to each other and never let go.”

I raised our linked hands. “I guess we just have to keep holding on.”

“That’s no problem for me.” Zack gazed at the sky. “It’s getting dark. Time to call in the dogs, piss on the fire, and saddle up.”

I looked at the muddy slope we had to climb, pushed myself to my feet, and took the handles of Zack’s chair. “Okay,” I said. “Let’s go home.”

In the next week, Zack and I slipped gratefully back into our old and comfortable ways. We stopped using words as percussive instruments with which we could set each other vibrating, and the silences between us were no longer heavy with things unsaid. Life went on.

The campaign moved into warp speed, and for Ginny the signs were good. Experienced politicians don’t need a psephologist to know how an election is going. If the candidate is dogged by a persistent cold; if the campaign literature arrives from the printers late and with a typo stating the candidate has given his life to pubic service; if the bus breaks down; if the heavens open up on the one scheduled outdoor event; if the crowds dwindle; if the media’s attention wanders; and if the staffers are snarling at one another, a campaign manager knows without checking Decima or Ekos that the candidate is tanking.

I had worked in campaigns like that. I knew what it was like to wake up in the morning with my stomach in knots because there was no way to stop the grim downward spiral of loss. That’s where Ginny’s campaign had been the night of Zack’s birthday, but after Jason Brodnitz withdrew from the custody battle, the public’s assessment of Ginny underwent a tectonic shift, and Ginny knew it. I could see it in the way she strode up front walks to knock on the doors of her constituents. She was sniffing victory. As we criss-crossed Palliser, the riding that I knew better than any, visiting the cafés with the chrome tables filled with farmers in John Deere caps who met every morning to discuss what needed discussing, and showing up at all-candidates meetings with attendance swollen by Ginny’s sudden possibilities, the campaign became fun.

One sweet May day, after ordering Monaghan Maple-Walnut at the Moose Jaw ice-cream shop where the proprietor had labelled an ice cream with each candidate’s name and tallied votes on the basis of how much of each ice cream sold, Keith and I sat outside on a bench, and he talked about his next big push.

He had decided to look past this election towards the big leadership challenge – the one that would rout the social conservatives and return his party to the principles Keith espoused. He wasn’t looking for a squeaker in Palliser; he was looking for a big win that would turn the party around.

In the days after she gained custody of her daughters, everything broke Ginny’s way. Momentum – “the big Mo,” as politicos and sports announcers call it – was with her. Media stories became soft focus, crowds swelled, and senior party people, scrutinizing her anew, liked what they saw: a smart, affable, seemingly tireless candidate. When, at Sean Barton’s urging, Ginny’s daughters agreed to campaign with their mother, Keith shook his head. “I don’t know what dark magic Sean used, but having the twins out there with Ginny is the best thing that could have happened for us.”

Indeed, the sight of these three powerfully built women with the identical engaging smiles silenced the cynics. Suddenly, family values, the two most semantically loaded words in modern politics, was Ginny’s issue, and the Monaghan campaign milked it. Three days before Mother’s Day, Sean arranged for a friend on the local paper to photograph Ginny and the twins bicycling in Wascana Park. The chokecherries were flowering, and the three women were positioned against a tree that had exploded in blossoms. It was the best of photo ops for the ad-fat Mother’s Day edition of the paper, and sister papers owned by the same chain in big markets picked it up. But Ginny’s campaign was more than just pretty pictures. She ended all her speeches with the same sentence; “We are the real party of the people.” The message was simple, positive, and utterly meaningless, but it was catching on, and the pundits had noticed.

One of our national newspapers published a story under the headline “NOTHING BUT BLUE SKIES FOR GINNY MONAGHAN,” and indeed the consensus seemed to be that it was smooth sailing all the way for Ginny. Those of us closer to the centre of the campaign knew better. Francesca Pope’s appearances at Ginny’s events became almost hallucinatory, like the troubling presence of a mysterious figure in a dream. More significantly, something was terribly wrong between Ginny and her ex-husband.

Ginny, who had seemed so indifferent to custody, suddenly was demanding full custody, and her demands had nothing to do with politics. She seemed genuinely concerned about allowing Jason to see the girls without a third person present. I heard her on the phone with him one night. “I’m getting these anonymous phone calls about you, Jason. They’re frightening. They say you’re a pimp. We both know what we know, but this is new, and it’s ugly. We’ve got to talk.” Seemingly they never did. Ginny watched the girls carefully, and whenever they saw their father, no matter how busy her schedule, she went along.

When I told Zack about the conversation I’d overheard, his reaction surprised me. “You know the woman at the centre of this is going to be Cristal.”

“Isn’t that a bit of a leap?”

“I don’t think so. According to Debbie Haczkewicz, the cops are getting nowhere trying to identify Cristal’s boyfriend. This guy was a genius at covering his tracks. They’ve talked to everybody – including Cristal’s sister – all they’ve got is that Cristal’s boyfriend was a mystery man who had to protect his reputation at all costs.”

“Vera Wang told me the relationship Cristal had with her pimp was a troubled one.”

Zack raised an eyebrow. “Those relationships are never made in heaven. And Jason Brodnitz would have solid reasons for keeping the relationship with Cristal secret.”

“Both professional and personal reasons,” I said. “Until a year ago, he was a pillar of the community. He must have wanted to get back his reputation.”

“And he wanted his daughters,” Zack said. “Being exposed as a pimp would put the kibosh on both those dreams.”

I thought of Jason’s abrupt change of heart after he encountered Sean in the men’s room of the courthouse. “Zack, would Sean have known that Jason was involved with prostitution?”

“Ginny was his client. If she was aware of the situation, she should have told him.”

The image of Jason watching with dead eyes as his counsel announced that he no longer wished to pursue custody flashed through my mind. “Zack, when Jason came back into court that day, he was in shock. If there was some secret between Ginny and him, it wasn’t that.”

Zack shrugged. “It’s possible the truth came to light after the hearing started – some kind soul might have dropped Ginny an anonymous note.”

“Regina’s a gossipy town,” I said. “You must have heard rumours about Jason.”

“Actually, in the last year I heard a lot, but they weren’t about Jason’s love life, they were about his business.”

“And what were people saying?”

“Pretty much that he was a guy to avoid. When he was working for Tatryn-Mulholland, he was hot stuff – a stockbroker with the Midas touch. He decided he was good enough to go it alone.”

“And it didn’t work out?”

“Nope. As soon as he was on his own, Jason lost his magic. He also lost a hell of a lot of money for his customers.”

“I hate stories like that. I’ve chosen mid-risk investments all my life, and I always get a cold feeling in the pit of my stomach when the quarterly report arrives in the mail.”

“I’m glad you weren’t watching our investments the first couple of months we were married. Luckily for us both, Ms. Shreve, I had a stock fraud client who gave me some solid advice about what to hold on to and what to sell. You and I are in good shape.”

“But Jason isn’t? His finances came up a couple of times during the custody suit, but Margot gave the court the impression he’d turned a corner.”

Zack frowned. “That surprises me, because I don’t know anybody who would have trusted Jason to handle their spare change. Of course, it’s entirely possible Margot was blowing smoke. I’ve done that myself when I got broadsided during a trial.”

“Margot’s your partner now. You could ask her.”

“Good idea.” Zack picked up his cell and hit speed-dial. “Hey, it’s me. I’ve got some questions, and don’t get pissed off and start telling me it’s none of my business, because I think it may be. How much did you charge Jason Brodnitz?” Zack whistled when he heard Margot’s answer. “You don’t come cheap. Has he paid you? Good. Now, Joanne tells me that during the custody dispute, you implied that Jason’s business reverses were over.” He listened. “Fair enough. The truth is always open to interpretation, and if he paid your bill up front, no worries. One more question. Is Brodnitz named as a beneficiary in Cristal’s will? Really? That is weird. Anyway, easily solved. Just go online with the Law Society and ask the firm that handled the will to get in touch with you.”

He held the phone away from his ear. “Yeah, yeah, yeah. But for all your expertise, you haven’t found the will, have you? So keep at it. If Brodnitz was Cristal Avilia’s boyfriend, we may have an interesting situation on our hands.”

The Friday before Mother’s Day, Zack flew up north with a client who was the CEO of a mining resources company. Their meeting was in La Ronge, and the client took pleasure in flying his own plane and doing some serious sightseeing en route. I spent the day trying not to think of my husband suspended over one of the heart-stoppingly immense lakes that make the north so beautiful and so deadly. At three-thirty, I left Ginny campaigning in a seniors’ home and picked Taylor up at school. We were going shopping.

Taylor surprised me by suggesting we start at Value Village. “Sometimes they have neat stuff,” she said. “And I don’t want to be like everybody else. I guess I’m kind of like my mother.” Her dark eyes scrutinized my face, watching for a reaction. I sensed there was something more she wanted to say, so I waited. “Did it matter to my mother that she was beautiful?” she said finally.

I shook my head. “No. The only thing that ever mattered to your mother was the art she made.” It was the truth, but that didn’t make the statement any less thoughtless.

Taylor didn’t let it pass. “And me,” Taylor said. “I mattered to my mother.”

“Yes, you did. Very much.”

“Because I had talent.”

“She loved you,” I said. “Your talent was just something else that connected you to her.”

Taylor’s look was assessing. “I guess some day I’ll figure out whether that’s true.”

I put my arm around her. “In the meantime, we might as well check out the bargains.”

The shopping gods were with us that afternoon. Value Village offered up a genuine treasure – a white cotton jersey T-shirt with cap sleeves and printed with Andy Warhol’s acerbic observation “Everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes” in black and pink. The moment Taylor put it on, she knew what she needed to complete the look: fitted black cotton pants, pink Capezio ballet flats, and a black cardigan. We continued shopping, stopped for a bowl of soup at the Creek Bistro, then went home. While Taylor changed, I let out the dogs and tried Zack’s cell, but he was out of range. I’d just started to riffle through the mail when Taylor came in wearing her new outfit. She looked like a very young Audrey Hepburn.

“So what do you think?” she said.

“I think for a girl who used to go to birthday parties in frilly dresses, pyjama bottoms, and odd socks, you’ve developed a definite fashion sense.”

“Did you really let me go out wearing my pyjama bottoms?”

“Sure. You were happy. That was all that mattered.”

Taylor lowered her head and stared at her pink Capezios. “Jo, what would have happened to me if you hadn’t taken me?”

“Where did that come from?”

“Lately I’ve been thinking about it a lot. You know, just kind of wondering…”

“Well, my guess is that some amazingly lucky family would have adopted you, and you would have been fine.” I touched her cheek. “But, Taylor, I wouldn’t have been fine.”

Her voice was small. “You wouldn’t have known.”

“I would have known,” I said.

“You have the other kids.”

“But I wouldn’t have had you, and I cannot imagine my life – any of our lives – without you.”

Her lips were tight. “I can’t imagine not having you either.”

“Then let’s let it go for the time being,” I said. “But if you want to talk, I’m here.”

Taylor swiped her eyes with the back of her hand. I reached across her desk and took a tissue from the box and handed it to her.

“Thanks,” she said. She blew her nose ferociously. “Angus says you’re always there whether we want you there or not.”

“Angus is right,” I said. “Now, we both have homework, but as soon as we get that out of the way, let’s make some popcorn and watch an episode of Battlestar Galactica.”

“Sweet,” Taylor said. “Can I ask Isobel to come over? She is so into Tahmoh Penikett.”

“As opposed to you,” I said.

Taylor dimpled. “I’m not as fanatic as Isobel. She sleeps with his picture under her pillow.”

When Taylor went off to call Isobel, I picked up the mail again. At first glance, it seemed like the usual: two magazines, a brochure encouraging us to holiday in Prince Edward Island, a tax receipt from a charity, and a bill from our water-softener company. But at the bottom of the pile there was a surprise – a peach greeting card envelope addressed to Joanne Shreve. The hand was unfamiliar, and there was no stamp. Neither fact set off any alarms. Zack liked surprises, and he always said I was a hard woman to spoil. There’d been another mystery envelope in the mailbox at Christmas. That one had contained the key to Chris Altieri’s cottage – the one closest to ours at Lawyers’ Bay. Zack had bought his partners’ shares of the cottage so that our grown children would have a place to stay when they visited. I smiled at the memory and opened the flap.

The envelope held three condoms and the bulletin from Cristal Avilia’s funeral. Across the picture of Cristal someone had scrawled a message in pink ink: “Is your husband missing her? I’ll help him forget.” There was a telephone number. I scanned the room to make certain Taylor hadn’t come in, then I picked up the phone and dialed. My hands were shaking, but I was tired of being jerked around.

When a woman picked up, I pressed on. “This is Joanne Shreve,” I said. “I got your card. Who are you?”

The woman on the other end of the line sounded young and stoned. “My name’s Bree,” she said. “Are you mad at me?”

“Not yet,” I said. “But I want to get to the bottom of this.”

“It will cost you,” she said.

“How much?”

“Is fifty dollars too much?” she said.

I exhaled. “No. Fifty dollars is fine. Where do you want to meet?”

“Nighthawks?”

“I’ll be there in fifteen minutes,” I said. “And, Bree, you’d better be there too.”

As I freshened my makeup, my resolve began to weaken, but Bree was expecting me. There was no turning back. Taylor’s bedroom door was open. She was at her desk, with Bruce and Benny at her feet.

I went over to her. “I have an errand,” I said. “I’ll be back in an hour. If I’m going to be longer, I’ll call.”

She nodded and kept working. “Isobel’s coming over in a few minutes to do homework with me.”

I leaned over to check her math exercise book. The pages before me were scrubbed thin with erasures. I rubbed her shoulder. “Taylor, do you need a tutor?”

She bent to her task again. “Uh-uh,” she said. “I just need a brain.”

I would have bet a cup of joe that the owner of Nighthawks on Broad Street hadn’t named his establishment after Edward Hopper’s signature painting of three customers seeking refuge from the loneliness of the night in a big city diner. Sealed off from the world by the diner’s expanse of glass, sealed off from one another by their own impenetrable isolation, the three customers in Hopper’s picture are a poignant reminder that, in the small hours, we are all alone. The people who haunted Nighthawks didn’t need Hopper’s painting to remind them of that. They knew they were alone every night when they inserted the key into the lock of their cheerless room and every morning when they hit the sidewalk and passersby averted their eyes at the sight of them.

When I stopped to withdraw cash from a bank on Broad Street, it occurred to me that I hadn’t asked Bree how I could identify her, but she made it easy. She was sitting at a table by the window, and when I came in, she jumped up and waved as if we were old friends. She was an anorexic with patchy white-blonde hair and she was definitely high on something other than life. Her long fingers never stopped fluttering and her pale feral eyes darted as she talked. “I’m having pie,” she said as I took the chair opposite hers. “They have really good saskatoon berry pie here. Do you want some? I can order it for you. I know the manager.”

I settled back in my chair. “I’m a big fan of saskatoons,” I said. “But I don’t want to take too much of your time.”

“My time is your time,” she said. She slipped her hand under the table. It took me a moment to realize she was waiting to be paid.

Over drinks at a rival firm’s holiday party, Zack had articulated his rule of thumb: “Pay an informer four times what they ask for and they’re yours.” I knew I needed Bree on my side, so I opened my wallet and took out four fifties.

When she saw the bills, Bree’s pale eyes took on a hectic glitter. Her white halter top hadn’t been constructed with room for a deposit, and her studded shorts were skin-tight, but she knew how to handle her finances. She scooped up the money, and either out of habit or hope of more, when she stood to slide the money into her back pocket, she thrust her pelvis at me.

“Now tell me exactly how you came to send out those cards,” I said.

Bree’s pie arrived and she took a spoon and began digging into it, moving the pieces around. “I have this page on MySpace – do you know what that is?”

I nodded.

“On my page, I say I do odd jobs for money. Most of the jobs I get are sex-related. I don’t care. At least it’s not boring.” She forked a piece of pastry loaded with saskatoons and licked the berries. Several of them fell on her halter top. She swept at them, smearing them on the shiny material covering her small breasts. “Turning people on gives me a rush,” she explained. “But that’s not why you handed me all that money. You want information, so here it is. What happened was I got a hit a few days ago from someone who said they would pay me big for doing a practical joke. I wrote back saying my life was a practical joke, and this person said everybody’s life was a joke, and if I sent them my home address, everything I needed would be sent to me.”

“You sent a stranger your home address?” I said.

“Why not?” Bree said. “Strangers come to my home all the time.” She stared at her nails meditatively. “My French manicure looks like shit. Anyway, the package was delivered. Everything was there – the condoms, the pictures, the envelopes, the addresses of the people I had to deliver to – and there was a note telling me what I had to write on the girl’s picture.”

“You delivered the envelopes by hand?” I said.

“By taxi,” she said. “It was easy. I had the addresses, so I just had the taxi take me from house to house. Boy, that dead girl must have had some client list – those houses were all mega expensive.”

“Was I the only one who called you?”

“So far.”

“How much did the person give you for the deliveries?” I asked.

“Five hundred, but I had to pay for the taxi out of it.”

“Didn’t all this strike you as a little weird?” I asked.

“No. Weird is the guy who comes to my place every Sunday afternoon and asks me to peel a hard-boiled egg and stick an old-fashioned pen into it while he jacks off.” She was starting to twitch. Clearly, money burned a hole in her pocket. “Anything else you need to know? I’ve got to motor.”

“You haven’t eaten your pie.” I said.

She looked at me with her glittering eyes. “The fun was in knowing that I could,” she said.

I touched her arm. “Bree, did the person who hired you tell you his name?”

She arranged her features in an approximation of thoughtfulness. “Maybe yes. Maybe no,” she said.

I slid another fifty-dollar bill across the chrome table. “That’s all I have,” I said.

“The person’s name was Jason. It was written on the instructions,” she added helpfully.

My heart was pounding, but I tried to stay cool. I reached into my bag, removed one of my university business cards, and wrote my cell number on the back. “You can get in touch with me at that number if you hear from the person who hired you.”

“I’ll give you my number too,” Bree said.

“I already have it. Remember, I called you?”

“Then I’ll give you my MySpace address.” She took a piece of paper from her pocket, borrowed my pen, and laboriously wrote out the url.

Isobel was playing with the cats and Zack was helping Taylor with her math when I got home. He held out his arms, and I was grateful to fold into them. “I’m so glad you’re here,” I said.

“Me too,” he said. “Where’ve you been?”

“Downtown on an errand,” I said. “We can talk about it later. How’s the math going?”

“Better,” Taylor said. “Zack showed me how to figure out square roots and cube roots. So I’m ready for Battlestar Galactica.”

“I could use a little escape myself,” Zack said. “It’s been a while since I studied pre-algebra.”

“Why don’t you put in the DVD, and the girls and I will get the drinks and popcorn.”

“Can we watch ‘Scattered’?” Taylor asked.

Zack scowled. “Isn’t that the one where Kara and Helo try to find a way to bring the Arrow of Apollo back to the fleet?”

Isobel stuffed her homework into her backpack. “Yes. How come you know?”

“Because we’ve watched that episode four times,” Zack said. “Why don’t we watch another one?”

Taylor rolled her eyes. “Because ‘Scattered’ is the episode with all the dreamy close-ups of Tahmoh Penikett.”

It had been a long day for both of us, but that night as we got ready for bed, Zack was buoyant. His meeting had gone well, and his client had flown low over the big lakes so Zack could see the islands. He’d taken dozens of pictures, and he was eager to share.

After I’d looked through them, I handed his camera back. “It really is spectacular country.”

“Gary says he’ll fly us up there any time you say the word.”

“Is Gary aware of the fact that I spent every spare moment today praying that you’d come back to earth?”

“And here I am,” Zack said. He lifted himself from his chair into bed. When he was settled, he patted the place beside him. “Come and tell me about your day.”

“The good part was that Taylor found the perfect outfit for the Farewell.”

His eyes bored into me. “And the bad part…?”

“The bad part was an adventure in bizarro world,” I said.

Zack winced when I handed him the peach envelope that had been dropped in our mailbox. But he listened without comment as I described my encounter with Bree. When I was finished he said. “Pretty stupid of Jason to give Bree his name, wasn’t it?”

“That’s what I thought,” I said.

“Do you think someone’s setting Brodnitz up?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “He could have just slipped. We’ll have to wait until we hear from Bree again.”

Zack sighed. “It won’t be long. Whoever hired her has found a trustworthy courier.”

“So you think there’ll be more messages.”

“Sure. And I’ll bet if I turned my cell on right now, we’d discover that you weren’t the only one who got a Mother’s Day card.”

“Zack, this isn’t about money, is it?”

“No,” he said. “I think it’s about something a lot uglier than money.” He reached over and turned out the light. “Jo, why did you go downtown tonight?”

“Because Taylor could easily have been in the room when I opened that envelope. I don’t want this filth touching her life. I want this over, Zack, and I’m going to do what I have to do to make it stop.”