The Glass Coffin

CHAPTER
12

As it always did, Bryn’s entrance changed the energy in the room. Whatever plans Jill and I had for checking out The Glass Coffin receded into the background as Jill helped her stepdaughter off with her coat.

“You look a little pale for someone who just had a walk,” Jill said, touching Bryn’s cheek.

“I changed my mind about the walk,” Bryn said. She stepped in front of the hall mirror, removed her red cashmere beret, and smoothed her hair.

Jill tried a laugh. “At the risk of sounding like a mother hen, where were you?”

“Taking care of business,” Bryn said. She frowned at her reflection, leaned forwards, and removed a speck of mascara from the corner of her eye. “We don’t have to worry about Tracy any more,” she said. “She’s out of the picture.”

Jill hung up Bryn’s coat. “Care to explain?” she asked.

“There’s nothing to explain,” Bryn said. “Dan says I should start taking responsibility for my own life. Tracy was a problem, and I took care of her. I’m supposed to keep a journal too, and I found the perfect one in the gift shop at the hospital.” She opened her purse and removed a notebook splattered with Van Gogh sunflowers. Bryn grazed Jill’s cheek with her lips. “Okay if I get into bed and start writing?”

“Absolutely,” Jill said, but after Bryn left, she looked bemused. “I seem to have become redundant,” she said.

“No more redundant than the parent of any other seventeen-year-old,” I said. I peered more closely at her. “Bryn isn’t the only one who looks a little pale,” I said. “Why don’t we make an early night of it too? The movie will still be there tomorrow, and you can have first dibs on the stack of books I got for Christmas.”

“All right,” Jill said, “but I get the one with the biggest print and the prettiest pictures.”

I was soldiering through the pivotal chapter of a novel about coming of age in London, Ontario, when the doorbell rang. I kept reading, hoping that someone else would get the door. No one did. Guessing the identity of the person pressing the button wasn’t a stretch. As I pulled on my slippers, I cursed young love and a son so addled by passion that he’d forgotten his keys. But when I opened the door I wasn’t faced with a post-tumescent Angus. My caller was Claudia, and she was steaming mad.

She didn’t wait to be invited in. “Where’s Jill?”

“In bed,” I said.

“Get her down here,” Claudia said, and her tone made me understand why she could make Willie quake.

“She’s sleeping,” I said.

“That’s more than any of the rest of us will do tonight. Wake her up.” Claudia pulled off her boots, threw her coat on top of them, and strode into the living room. Willie, recognizing his mentor, lumbered in and sidled up. When I went to get Jill, she was already at the top of the stairs.

“You’ve been summoned,” I said.

Jill drew her robe around her and tied it. “What’s going on?”

“You’ll have to ask Claudia,” I said.

Claudia didn’t wait to be asked. The moment she spied Jill, she attacked. “We kept the facts about Bryn’s birth secret for all these years,” she sputtered. “What in God’s name made you think you could just spring it on her today?”

“I thought she was old enough to handle the truth,” Jill said gently.

“Do you know what she did with ‘the truth’?” Claudia asked. “She came down to the hospital tonight and told Tracy and me she was starting a new life and there was no place for us in it. You can imagine what that attack did to Tracy. She was so distraught she had to be sedated.”

Jill was coldly furious. “Poor Tracy – having to be sedated. What about all the days and nights when Bryn was distraught? Where was your compassion then, Claudia? More to the point, where were you and your sister-in-law?”

“You don’t know anything about us,” Claudia said. “You breeze in with my brother, have tea with my mother, smile at the rest of us, remove the lynchpin from our lives, waltz out the door, and leave us to cope. You’re the one who’s going to have to cope now, Jill. That daughter of whom you are so very proud has some secrets of her own. Nasty secrets.”

“Bryn doesn’t have any secrets from me.”

“Really,” Claudia said. “So you know that just minutes before Evan died, his daughter told him she wished someone would kill him.”

Jill’s face was bloodless. “No,” she breathed.

“There’s more,” Claudia said. “After Bryn expressed her heart’s desire, she picked up that hunting knife of yours and said how good it felt in her hand, how powerful it made her feel.”

“You’re lying,” Jill said.

“Other people heard her. Tracy and Felix were there – so was Evan. That’s what made him walk out into the snowstorm. He was trying to protect your future as a family. He knew Bryn was hysterical. It wasn’t the first time she’d been like that, but he wanted her to have a chance – we all wanted that.” Claudia rubbed her temples with her fingertips as if to erase the memory. “It was probably the single unselfish thing my brother ever did and look what it got him.”

I could see Jill was badly shaken, but she was fighting for control. “Let’s stick to the facts,” she said. “There was a scene between Bryn and Evan. Adolescent girls fight with their fathers – that’s a fact. And Bryn had more reason than most to be angry with her father. That’s another fact. Everything beyond that is speculation. And Claudia, I’ve learned not to deal in speculation.”

“Really,” Claudia said. “Then why did you go racing out towards the maze the second I told you Bryn had taken off? Why was there blood all over that cloak of my mother’s? And why was the handle of the knife that killed Evan wiped clean? You were doing a little speculating yourself, weren’t you, Jill? And you came to exactly the same conclusion I did. You thought Bryn killed Evan, and you were covering her tracks exactly the way the rest of us were.”

For an agonizing moment, the two women eyed each other.

When, finally, Jill broke the silence, her voice was a whisper. “What are you going to do?”

The simple question seemed to extinguish Claudia’s fire. Her response was as tentative as Jill’s. “I was planning to go to the police, but now…”

“But now you realize that would be totally destructive.” Jill clasped the other woman’s hands in her own, pressing her advantage. “Claudia, your duty is the same as it’s always been – to put Bryn first. Evan’s dead – nothing will change that. But the police don’t have anything. If we all stick to our stories, they never will. I’m begging you. Let’s salvage what we can. Help me save Bryn.”

In all the years I had known her, I’d never seen Jill abase herself. The sight was wrenching, and I turned away, hoping that the worst was over. It wasn’t.

“I can talk to her,” Jill said, “convince her that the best thing for all of us is to continue to be part of your family. She has her heart set on New York, but there are weekends and holidays. We could get a place near you in Toronto. You and Tracy and Caroline could be there for Bryn – always.”

“Will you get me my own two-wheeler too?”

“I don’t understand,” Jill said.

Claudia looked at her with pity. “That was a joke,” she said. “My way of saying I’ll do what you want.”

Jill’s relief was palpable. “You won’t regret it.”

As Claudia put on her coat and boots, I was frozen, stunned by the enormity of the devil’s bargain I had witnessed. But when she put her hand on the doorknob, I moved. “Do you have a cell number?”

“Doesn’t everybody?” Claudia asked.

I handed her a pen and paper and she wrote out her name and number. I checked her signature, satisfied myself that it didn’t match the handwriting on the note, and bid her good night.

When the door closed behind Claudia, Jill sank onto the cobbler’s bench in the hall. “Don’t start on me, Jo,” she said.

“I wouldn’t know where to begin,” I said. “And there’s nothing I can tell you that you don’t already know. Jill, if Bryn really is involved in Evan’s death, you can’t cover it up. Kevin’s a good lawyer. He’ll be able to talk to the Crown about what Evan did to his daughter…”

Jill put her hands over her ears, like a child shutting out the world. “I don’t know what happened between Bryn and Evan. I don’t want to know. I just want her to have a life. I want us to have a life. Is that too much to ask?” When Jill raised her face to me, the misery in her eyes killed the answer in my throat.

“We can talk in the morning,” I said.

She nodded. “I’ll phone Kevin and tell him to call off his investigators.”

“Why not let them keep working?” I said. “They might find evidence that implicates someone else.”

“And they might not,” Jill said. “You know the old axiom: a smart lawyer never asks a witness a question to which she doesn’t already have the answer. I don’t have any answers, so I can’t afford to have people running around asking questions.”

“What happened to ‘And the truth shall set you free’?”

Jill met my gaze. “Will you ever be able to respect me again?”

I put my arms around her – in part because I wanted to reassure her, but also because I didn’t know what to say.

The next morning when I came back from taking Willie for his run, there was a note on my plate telling me that Bryn had insisted on keeping her appointment with Dan, and Jill and she had gone to his office in a cab. Clearly, Jill was no more eager than I was for a face-to-face, and I was grateful she had spared us both an encounter that would have been beyond awkward.

I had no idea when Kevin Hynd started his business day, but I was in no mood to wait. I was also in no mood to roll over and play dead while a friend made decisions that could land her in jail. When he answered his phone, Kevin sounded foggy, but my precis of the night’s events galvanized him. “We need to talk, Joanne,” he said. “I’ll put on the coffee pot.”

My pulse quickened as I spied Further’s multi-coloured, Day-Glo, spray-painted exterior. Like Ken Kesey, the owner of the iconic, iridescent bus from which Kevin’s business took its name, I was going into uncharted territory, but Kesey had a garden of pharmaceutical delights to ease his passage, and I was going in straight.

Kevin opened the door immediately. “I saw your car pull up,” he said. “Welcome.” Mellow in blue jeans and a mohair sweater the colour of a frozen grape, he helped me off with my coat and ushered me into his kitchen.

He handed me a mug of coffee and a plate filled with still-warm biscotti. “Comfort for the body and the soul,” I said. “I’m a lucky woman.”

“We at Further aim to please.” He pulled up a chair opposite me. “Your timing couldn’t have been better, Joanne. Shania called just after you did. She’s on her way over.”

“News?”

“Apparently,” he said. “But it can wait. Let’s enjoy the moment.”

The coffee had a chicory bite that conjured up New Orleans and the biscotti were dotted with pistachio nuts and cranberries that made them simultaneously savoury and sweet. Giving myself over to sensual pleasures was easy, but as I reached for a second biscotti, I knew it was time to fill Kevin in. I omitted telling him about Jill’s decision to call a halt to the investigations, but even without that information, Kevin was uneasy.

“Her mind is clouded by fear and love,” he said. “She’s making bad choices.”

“My thinking exactly,” I said. “So what do we do?”

Kevin shrugged. “Stay the course,” he said. “See what Shania comes up with, and keep hoping that neither of us has to remind Jill that mother love is not a justification for condoning murder.”

The Shania of my imagining was a woman with big hair, a midriff she was proud to bare, and three navel piercings. The Shania who walked into Kevin’s shop had a small, plug-shaped body, a round, flat face, almond eyes, coppery-red hair that was smartly buzzed, and skin the colour of strong tea. She was dressed in layers that she proceeded to strip away: first a pea jacket with wooden toggles, next a heavy satin jacket with a mandarin collar and frog fastenings, then a turquoise silk shirt covered in birds of paradise. When she came to a simple cotton T-shirt with a picture of Jim Morrison, she stopped.

Kevin introduced us, offered her refreshments, and smiled. “Whenever you’re ready, Shania.”

“I’m always ready.” She turned to me and said, “A word about my methods. I have a good brain, and I use it. Kevin has given me photos of the principals and accounts that are as detailed as he can make them. If he was aware of the actual words used by one of the principals, he attempted to relay them accurately. The value of a true verbatim account is beyond rubies, but even close is good. After Kevin and I talked, I went home to contemplate.” Her face was split by a slow moon-like smile. “I must thank you, Kevin, for that exquisite box of Thai sticks.”

Kevin touched his forehead in a small salute. “I knew you’d appreciate them.”

“Oh I did,” she said. “And they speeded an epiphany. As I sat in my room, smoking and mulling, one sentence nagged. You reported that Inspector Kequahtooway told Joanne that Felix Schiff seemed to ‘disappear off the face of the earth for sixteen hours.’ That action didn’t jibe with Joanne’s description of Mr. Schiff as a ‘go-to-guy.’ What, I asked myself, would make a man known as the one to be counted on in a pinch vanish when his friend’s need for him was so great?”

“Because his friend asked him to,” I said.

Shania nodded. “Of course, that raised another question. What had Mr. Schiff been asked to do during those hours? Here two figures of speech fused in my mind: Inspector Kequahtooway’s image of Mr. Schiff ‘disappearing off the face of the earth’ and the image you used, Kevin, when you paraphrased the inspector’s remarks. You told me that Felix Schiff had ‘vanished into thin air’?” Shania gazed first at Kevin, then at me. “Are you following my train of thought?” she asked.

The penny dropped. “Felix flew somewhere that night,” I said.

Shania nodded approval. “Precisely. I took Mr. Schiff’s photo out to the airport and showed it to someone who’s been known to share information with Kevin and me. After a little detective work of his own, our contact discovered Felix Schiff had flown to Toronto on the early-evening flight and returned the next morning.”

I remembered Felix’s appearance when he’d come into the hotel the morning after Evan was murdered. He looked like hell, but it wasn’t because he’d been cruising the club scene. He’d travelled three thousand miles in those hours, but except for the time he’d been seated on airplanes, his whereabouts was unaccounted for. “What was he doing in Toronto?” I said.

“That’s still to be determined,” Shania said. “But as a rule these quick flying trips indicate the need to cover something up or recover something. Kevin, I think your client should give Richard Shanks the go-ahead to hire more people to find out exactly what Felix Schiff was up to that night.”

Kevin shot me a look.

“Just tell Richard Shanks to do what he has to do,” I said. “If the bills for the detectives get out of line, I’ll cash in my pop bottles. And let’s make sure the former housekeeper gets special attention.” I looked at Kevin. “Does Shania know about the cooperative Mrs. Carruthers?”

Shania answered for him. “I do,” she said. “Did Mrs. Carruthers’s sudden departure from the household where she’s worked for fifty years raise a question in your mind, Joanne?”

“It did,” I said. “And there’s something else. From all accounts, Caroline MacLeish is incapable of living in that house alone. If Mrs. Carruthers has really moved on to greener pastures, why hasn’t Caroline called and asked her daughter to come home?”

Kevin arched an eyebrow. “Are you suggesting that if I were to phone the MacLeish household at this very moment, the mysterious Mrs. Carruthers might answer the phone?”

“My guess is she wouldn’t be far away,” I said.

Kevin pulled an address book from his pocket, consulted it, then picked up his cell.

The speech he gave to the person who answered the phone in Toronto revealed that, as a prankster, Kevin was canny as well as merry. “This is Jim Morrison,” he said.

Shania beamed and glanced fondly at the image on her T-shirt.

“I’m with CHJO Radio,” he continued. “We’re doing a story on Evan MacLeish. The word out here is that MacLeish’s mother is some kind of nutcase. Would anybody at that address be willing to talk to us about her on air?”

I could hear the sputter of outraged denial from where I sat.

“And your name, ma’am.”

Kevin listened, then touched his index finger to his thumb in the circle that indicates success. “Thank you, Mrs. Carruthers, we here at CHJO pride ourselves on our accuracy.” Kevin hung up and shook his head. “It appears Mrs. C didn’t leave her post after all,” he said. “We’ve been had.”

Shania rubbed her buzz thoughtfully. “Sometimes ‘being had’ is instructive. Obviously Mrs. Carruthers didn’t come up with the idea for this wild goose chase on her own. She was acting on someone’s instructions.”

“Whose?” Kevin asked.

“Someone who was willing to throw every member of that household except Caroline to the wolves,” I said.

“Or someone who wanted to make it appear that way,” Shania said.

“ ‘Always walls, always corridors, always doors – and on the other side, still more walls,’ ” I said.

Kevin leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. “Last Year at Marienbad,” he said. “A truly strange adventure in cinema.”

“It was indeed,” I agreed. “And I’d like to stay and talk about it, but I have my own adventure in cinema waiting. Do you two need me here?”

“We like having you here,” Kevin said. “But need is another matter.”

“We’re cool,” Shania said. “We’re just going to discuss logistics and personnel. What movie caught your interest?”

“Another film by Evan MacLeish,” I said. “All I know is the title. It’s called The Glass Coffin.”

“Evocative,” Kevin said. He picked up a biscotti, wrapped it in a paper napkin, and handed it to me. “One for the road,” he said. “And don’t forget to call me with your movie review.”

I drove around Dan’s neighbourhood until I was certain Bryn’s appointment was over. At this point, my relationship with Jill was too precariously poised to risk confrontation. When my watch indicated that it was five minutes to the hour, I thought I was safe.

Dan was in his backyard scooping sunflower seeds into one of his bird feeders. He acknowledged my presence with a wave of his scoop and kept filling the feeder with seeds. “The house finches love these,” he said. “They’ve just started coming to Saskatchewan, so I want to make them welcome.”

“They’re lucky they have such a thoughtful provider,” I said.

“Works both ways,” Dan said. “As soon as the angle of the sun is right, the finches begin to sing. They have the most glorious song, and they begin so early – late February or early March. To hear them when there’s still snow on the ground is like a promise from spring.”

Dan closed the bag of seeds and faced me. “You have to talk to Jill,” he said.

“The session went badly?”

“The session didn’t go at all,” he said. “Jill refused to leave Bryn alone with me. I don’t get it. The whole idea was to give Bryn someone she could open up to, but today it was as if Jill was afraid to let Bryn say anything. Understandably, Bryn was upset at Jill’s interference. She’d brought along this journal she’d started, and she was anxious to talk about what she’d written.”

“But Jill wouldn’t let her?”

“No,” he said. “I suggested Jill come into the house to resolve the problem, and as soon as we were alone, she fired me.”

“I don’t know what to say, Dan – except to apologize. You’ve gone out of your way to help us.” I looked at him carefully. “You are aware that this is no reflection on you.”

Dan nodded. “My ego will survive,” he said. “It’s Bryn I’m concerned about.”

“I’m concerned about everybody and everything,” I said. “And I haven’t a clue about what, if anything, I should do next.”

“Do you want to talk about it? I still have a couple more minutes before my next appointment.”

“Okay, I guess I should start by saying that Jill would not be happy to see me here.”

“She doesn’t want you talking to me?”

“She doesn’t want anybody talking about Bryn – she wants Kevin to shut down his investigation; she wants you to stop Bryn’s therapy; and she’s offered Claudia and Tracy pretty much whatever they want if they’ll agree to keep spinning stories that will protect Bryn.”

“From what?” Dan asked. “The biggest threat to Bryn is herself.”

“Jill doesn’t see it that way. She thinks that if people start delving too deeply into Evan MacLeish’s murder, they might find something that will connect Bryn to it.”

“Does Jill really believe Bryn killed her father?” Dan’s words formed little clouds in the frigid air.

“I think she doesn’t want to risk knowing the truth,” I said.

“And she’s prepared to build a life on not knowing.” Dan said. “That surprises me. Jill struck me as someone who would want to know everything.”

“As a rule she does, but she’s also a human being, and as you once told me, that means being ‘fallible, fucked up, and full of frailty.’ ”

Dan grinned. “The world according to Albert Ellis,” he said.

“There are worse teachers,” I said.

“Yeah,” Dan agreed. “There are.”

A teenaged boy in an army surplus winter jacket came around the corner. “Hey, Dan,” he shouted. “Notice that I’m right on time for once.”

Dan gave the boy the high sign. “I’m impressed,” he said. “Let’s get rolling.” Dan turned back to me. “I’ll keep eight tomorrow open for Bryn. Bring her yourself if you have to.”

“I’ll do my best,” I said. “Dan, I’d like to go inside and check out some of the films that came from Evan’s office. I shouldn’t be long.”

“Stay as long as you like,” he said. “You won’t be in my way. I have back-to-back appointments all morning.”

Even the warmth of Dan’s welcoming home couldn’t dispel the chill I felt when I contemplated Jill’s future. The night of the rehearsal dinner, as Jill stood between Angus’s torches, swathed in the soft folds of her timeless velvet cloak, it seemed she had finally gotten it right. In that incandescent moment, everything seemed possible for her. Now it was clear that no matter what Jill did, her story wouldn’t end with “happily ever after.”

As I came into the living room, I was overwhelmed with despair. For days, I’d been fuelled by adrenaline, responding to the unimaginable, reacting, deciding, hoping against hope. Now the heart had gone out of me. I was sick of tragedy and death. In the words of the old Spirit of the West song, all I wanted was to turn my head and walk, walk away.

But if the last days had taught me anything it was that, wherever I walked, trouble would follow.

I sank to my knees and began hunting through one of the boxes of tapes that had been sent from Evan’s office in Toronto. My search was perfunctory, but The Glass Coffin wasn’t hard to spot. The other tapes were obviously works-in-progress with titles and dates hand-printed on their spines. The Glass Coffin was in a paper sleeve with the name and address of a film and video processing company printed on the box and a computerized label describing the box’s contents: The Unblinking Eye: The Glass Coffin, Seamless Master, Length: 44.58 minutes. (Textless @ Tail), Ch I

2: Stereo Mix. There were other notations, too cryptic for me, but I knew at once I’d found the tape Evan had sold to the network.

I put it in the machine and pressed play. In seconds, the room was filled with the hauntingly elegiac “Pavanne for a Dead Princess” by Maurice Ravel. On screen, the ruffled deep-mauve petals of a perfect rose bloomed slowly in the soft morning light. A woman began to speak. “Even their names are beautiful,” she said. “Shropshire Lad, Abellard, Cajun Dancer, Gabriel’s Fire, Dakota, Black Magic, Callisto, Natasha Monet, Flamingo, Cachet, Cadenza, Hand in Hand, Lasting Peace.” The camera pulled back, revealing as it moved a fairy-tale profusion of roses in the extravagantly gorgeous hues of early summer: deep rose, soft pink, apricot, lemon, pale peach, cream, burgundy, magenta. As the distance between the camera and the roses increased, the vibrant life of the garden ebbed, making the petals seem less a product of nature than of an artist’s broken brushwork.

The woman’s seductive contralto continued. “It’s been forty years since I felt the sun like a hand on my back as I bent to the earth; forty years since I knew that numinous moment when the scent of growing roses perfumes the air. For forty years, I’ve watched the world from behind a wall of glass.”

When the camera moved to the woman’s face, I was struck by how young Caroline MacLeish appeared to be. Evan’s lighting of his mother had been benevolent, but Caroline’s agelessness went beyond a filmmaker’s trick. Like the cloistered nuns of my childhood, Caroline had been sheltered from the harsh rays of the world’s scrutiny, and, like them, her complexion retained the faint pearl-like aura of youth when chronological youth was just a memory.

There were no flashbacks to still photographs of Caroline as she had been before the postpartum incident that circumscribed her life. Evan’s interest was clearly less in what had shaped Caroline than in how Caroline had shaped her world. The first minutes of the movie followed Caroline through the small ceremonies of her day: her hour in bed with Indian tea and the newspapers; her careful coordination of her makeup, clothing, and accessories; her diligent study of current medical journals and the Internet for the latest information about her illness; her supervision of the plantings and prunings in her rose garden. It was impossible not to pity this woman who hadn’t felt the wind on her face or been touched by a raindrop for four decades. But as Evan enlarged his focus to include the secondary players in Caroline’s drama, sympathy turned to revulsion. One by one, the members of Caroline’s inner circle – Evan, Claudia, Tracy, Bryn – made their entrances. All approached Caroline with the pitiful eagerness of beggars seeking alms; all left with nothing more than scraps of her attention. No matter how often they were ignored or rejected, they kept coming back – arms outstretched, eyes wary but hopeful. Evan’s portrait of the power of the clinical narcissist was devastating. It also raised some provocative questions about the filmmaker and his subject. Had Evan been aware of what his film revealed about Caroline or had years of living with her blinded him to the truth? And what about Caroline? What had she seen when she looked at footage of The Glass Coffin? A dutiful son’s tribute to his mother or betrayal? One thing was certain. The film proved that Jill had been wrong about her mother-in-law – Caroline MacLeish was a monster.

When I heard the outside door open, I was so certain it was Dan, I didn’t even turn my glance from the screen. “You have to see this,” I said. “Not just because it will give you insight into Bryn, but because you could build your career on this woman.”

On screen, Caroline was commiserating with Tracy. “Sometimes the wisest thing is simply to accept the fact that the best part of your life is over. Why fight the truth?

“Acting is for the young, and you’re no longer young. From now on, the spotlight will always be on someone else.” Caroline placed a finger under Tracy’s chin so she could tilt the younger woman’s face towards her own. “Let’s not have any more talk about you starting a new life,” she said in her warm voice. “You have a life, Tracy – here in this house, with us.”

“So you found The Glass Coffin.” Felix Schiff’s voice was a shock, but not an unpleasant one.

I glanced over at him. He was still dressed for outdoors. “Take off your jacket and boots and come sit by me,” I said. “I could use some company. How did you know where I was?”

“I didn’t,” he said. “I was looking for Jill. Your son thought she’d brought Bryn over here.”

“They left,” I said. “They’re probably back at my house by now.”

Felix removed his coat and boots and threw them in the corner of the living room – it was an uncharacteristically thoughtless move, but given the fact that his eyes hadn’t once left the TV screen, an understandable one. “I don’t need to see Jill any more,” he said. “I found what I was looking for.”

“ The Glass Coffin,” I said. “I don’t think there’s any doubt now that this was the film Evan sold NBC as the pilot.”

I handed him the box the tape had come in.

“He’s a Judas,” Felix spit the epithet. “What kind of man would betray his mother for a handful of silver and a moment of fame?”

“No one betrayed Caroline MacLeish.” I pointed at the television screen. “Look at her. She knew she was being filmed.”

“Of course she knew she was being filmed,” Felix shouted. “But that movie was never intended to be a commercial property. That film was supposed to be a research tool. It was Caroline’s gift to the world.”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“Don’t blame yourself,” he said. “True altruism is rare. You can be forgiven for not recognizing it. Allowing herself to be the subject of a film was excruciating for Caroline. She’s an intensely private person, but she knew the medical community needed to be shown the limitations of its thinking.” Felix threw the empty film box on the table in front of us. “Caroline said psychiatry was still a primitive discipline – in its infancy.”

“And The Glass Coffin was supposed to add to the body of knowledge,” I said.

“Exactly. Caroline wanted the doctors who had presented themselves as her saviours to see that she could triumph without them.”

On screen Caroline was staring into the camera. Her eyes were startling – the blue of forget-me-nots. “I used to believe that John Milton was right,” she said. “That ‘the mind is its own place, and in itself/can make a heav’n of hell, a hell of heav’n.’ For years I blamed myself for what my life had become. I convinced myself that I had taken heav’n and turned it to hell. The moment I realized that my mind was more complex than anything a seventeenth-century man could have imagined, I was freed – if not into a fully realized life, at least into a life. The mind may be ‘its own place,’ but the superior mind can make accommodations – ensure that it has what it needs to feed it, to keep it from being conquered.”

My stomach clenched. This was beyond hubris; this was insanity.

Felix gripped my hand with excitement. “There,” he said. “Now you can see it. Fate wounded Caroline, but she used her intelligence and spirit to heal herself. She’s incomparable.”

I was dumbfounded. “You’re in love with her,” I said.

“I’ve loved her for twenty-five years. We plan to marry, but we have to wait.”

“For what?” I said.

“For her family to accept us. The health of the household on Walmer Road means everything to Caroline. She was afraid our marriage would introduce an element of instability that would disturb the balance.”

It was an effort to keep my jaw from dropping. “The balance,” I repeated.

Felix’s eyes were glazed, and there was a sheen of sweat on his upper lip. “Caroline knew how much every member of that household relied on her. Everything she said or did had to be exquisitely calibrated to maintain the equilibrium.” There had always been a certain boyish athleticism about Felix, but as he leaned forward to stare at the screen he was a shell, like a building that had been gutted by fire. “Are you beginning to understand now, Joanne?” he asked softly. “We wanted nothing more than to be together, but she was prepared to sacrifice her happiness for her family’s sake. And I had to sacrifice too.”

“What have you sacrificed, Felix?” I asked.

He looked at me from unseeing eyes. “Self-respect, friendship, honour.” He drew his hands together as if in prayer. “And now comes the final sacrifice. She said it might come to this. That’s why she gave me the gun.”

Felix took the remote control from my hand and pressed pause. On screen, Caroline was frozen in the pool of deep gold light cast by the antique lamp behind her chair. Out of nowhere came a memory of a paperweight from my childhood: a chunk of amber that preserved a lifeless but still perfect wasp.

Suddenly, I was numb with fear. “What are you going to do?” I said.

When Felix pulled out his cellphone, I almost laughed with relief. The cell as a lifeline to the real world was a cliche of the film industry. But as Felix tapped in a number and waited for an answer, he was not a comic figure. He was as tightly wound as a man calling to hear medical test results that he knew would spell his doom.

As he listened to the voice on the other end of the line, it seemed the screws were tightening.

“It’s over,” he said. “People have seen the film. The network is committed to showing it. There’s nothing more I can do. Not about The Glass Coffin – not about anything. I have the sense that I’m being followed. That can mean only one thing. The police know it was me.” As he listened to the response to his words, Felix hung his head, a schoolboy being chastised. “You have nothing to fear,” he said finally. “There’s no way they can connect you to any of this. They could rip the tongue out of my mouth before I’d tell them anything.” He fell silent again, taking in every word. Then for the first time since he walked into the room, the weight seemed to have been lifted from his shoulders. “Yes,” he said. “I have it with me. You promise it will be that way? That’s more than I could have hoped. A double exit – with our souls leaving our bodies at the same moment.” He smiled to himself. “I’ll wait for your call.”

Felix placed the cell carefully on the table in front of him, then he took a small pistol and two bullets from his jacket pocket. His hands were trembling, but he had no trouble inserting the bullets in their chambers.

“There,” he said, looking down at the loaded gun in his hand. “I’m ready. Nothing to do now but wait.”

“She’s not worth it,” I said. Uncensored and unwise, the words tumbled out of my mouth. “Felix, she’s using you. Look at the movie. She uses everybody. She’s evil and manipulative. She’s destroyed so many lives already. Don’t let her destroy yours.” I moved towards him and reached out to touch his hand. “Listen to me,” I said. “You know I’m right.”

“You couldn’t be more wrong,” he said, and his voice was tinged with pity. “My life began the night I met Caroline MacLeish. All I’ve ever wanted was to share my life with her fully, deeply, completely. Her family kept us from sharing our lives. I cannot allow anyone to keep us from sharing our deaths.”

Felix’s face was wax-pale, drained, but his eyes had the zealot’s glow. The metamorphosis of ein prakiter Mensch into madman was mesmerizing. When he changed the position of the gun, it took me a moment to realize that, suddenly, the muzzle was pointing at me.