Chapter 6

Jean gave her mind over to thoughts of blood. It was the morning, and she sat drinking English Breakfast tea across from Milt in their bright dining area, with a daisy light from the bay window painting the far wall and the antiqued china cabinet. She watched him eat his crusty toast with marmalade—an oddly bitter taste with which to begin the day, she’d always thought—and knew that blood was not going to be a problem.

This was the great benefit, the singular one, really, of having been raised by a veterinarian mother wholly oblivious to a young daughter’s sensitivities. Watching Marjorie in her white coat cut into tabbies and Labradors, even once a Great Dane—anaesthetized and splayed out larger than either of her little brothers on the kitchen table—had inured Jean very early on to the sloshy, lurid aspects of organs and vessels and bodily fluids. She was more accustomed to it, at the age of seven or eight, than the first-year veterinary students who were sometimes assigned to work with her mother, who would often observe Marjorie slicing open a pink, shaved belly and faint with a crash at the first scarlet trickle.

“That was nice last night,” said Milt. “Everyone seemed to have a good time.”

“Mmmm,” said Jean. Her eyes were set without seeing on the first done button of Milt’s Lacoste golf shirt, which had been purple when she’d bought it for him twenty or so years before and had since faded to a lavender-tinted gray. Milt wore this shirt when he had no substitute teaching assignments and planned to idle the day away in the house, reading how-to books he’d bought at the hardware store, as if reading about how to do something forgave never managing to do it.

And he had never once golfed.

“What are you thinking about?” he said.

She wiped splashes of red out of her mind and lifted the teapot to freshen her cup. “Nothing to concern you.” He was still nervous about the night before, Jean could tell. Worried about her mood or her attitude regarding his encounter with Louise. Husbands, she thought, or hers at least, monitored their wives for trouble the way pioneers once watched their dry goods, checking for mold in the wheat flour, weevils in the corn. But the fact was that she couldn’t have been less concerned about anything happening between Milt and Louise. She almost wished something would happen, if that’s what would make Louise happy. Because that was all that mattered to her now, the happiness of her closest friends. That was the vital thing. That was the point.

“You’re not thinking about Louise, are you?” said Milt.

“No, not Louise. Not specifically.”

“I mean Louise and me. Because there’s nothing to think about there, Jean. That’s all over. That’s history. The whole Mojito thing was just a total, weird coincidence.”

“Stop worrying about it, Milt. It’s not even in my mind.”

“Okay.” Frowning, he began to spread marmalade on a second piece of hard toast, dry, the way he preferred it lately. “So is it to do with your work? That kudzu piece?”

She lifted her tea. “It’s an idea. Something a little different.”

He bit into his toast, watching her, and began jabbing at the air with his half-eaten slice. “Yeah. I should’ve figured it out. You’ve got that faraway idea thing happening in your eyes. Oh, jeez, sorry.”

A bit of marmalade had flicked onto her cheekbone, and Jean wiped at it with a finger and then licked it off. Foul, bitter, rindy taste. No, marmalade was not for her.

Milt kept his head down for a while, chewing his crust, his mouth emitting sounds of walking on gravel. When he looked up he said, “Is it something I could help with?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Remember I used to help you? Remember that time you needed a bigger kiln and I helped you build it?”

She sipped at her tea. “I think I hired someone to do that.”

“But I read up on it.”

Jean set down her cup, reached across the table, and laid her hand on his wrist.

“I took out all those books from the library so I could advise you.”

“Milt, darling,” she said, smiling as sweetly as she could but letting him see her eyes. “I’ll slice my wrists if you don’t stop talking.”

“Okay, you’re concentrating, sorry. Artist at work.” He popped the last bite of toast into his mouth. “It’s nice to have you home, though.”

She had so much to do. So much to think about. Jean took their little Hyundai to the Sobeys for a shop, partly because the house was low on just about every staple—Milt’s own shopping while she’d been gone had apparently centered on milk, bread, and a rotation of frozen stir-fry dishes—but also because she knew it would help her. Ever since living as a student on her own she’d found that walking up and down the aisles of a supermarket, when it wasn’t too busy, really cleared her head.

Inside the store she grabbed a cart, picked out the old flyer that was lying in the bottom, and made her way into the produce section. There she felt the ceiling’s full cathedral height above her, and let the cool, humid air hit her face and neck like a breeze off the lake and bring goosebumps to her sleeveless arms. She went slowly through the mixed greens, the herbs and packaged salads, the fennel and snow peas showered with mist. And then, finally, past the tomatoes, amid the citrus and the pineapples, Jean nudged into the question that was plaguing her most at the moment. The question was: Who should be first?

That dilemma sat on her as something stressful and fraught because, having had the vision, she had to act. She was compelled. An idea unexecuted was no better than a daydream; it did nobody any good. Yet acting on her vision required making a choice, and to choose one friend before the others suggested she liked one best, while the others would have to follow in some sort of ranking, next to least. To Jean that didn’t seem right at all. It was possible to have a best friend, she supposed, one who resonated in one’s experience more deeply than anyone else. But after her experience with Cheryl she had always tried to avoid making judgments like that. Even when girls in her class wanted to be granted that status, wanted exclusive access to her secrets, or sole rights to the cafeteria seat beside her. No, she wouldn’t do that. She loved all her friends equally.

It was another reason for her mother to shake her head in exasperation. “You have to find your strongest allies, Jean,” she would say, frowning at the irritation of her as she scratched through her paperwork. “You have to form a circle of support. It’s ridiculous and unnatural not to. If you try to make everyone your friend you won’t have any real friends at all.”

Well, somehow she had managed, and she had cultivated a group of friends that she cared about deeply. Through the years, of course, the numbers had diminished. People got busy with their careers, raising their families. Some of them died—Margy Benn getting her head split open by a mare’s hoof at thirty-two had been a shock. (Quick for her, though, Jean now considered; so much better than Jane Tiller and her cervix. Oh, if only she had thought of this sooner.) And of course, saddest of all, she had lost Cheryl’s friendship—not just lost it but thrown it away.

That was a mistake she couldn’t take back, Jean knew. It was a piece that had shattered in the kiln. But what she could do, what she had to do, was try again. She could do the best thing now, for all of her friends. And pushing her cart past the baskets of peaches, Jean realized that meant she had to find a way to put an order to her plans. Someone had to be first, and someone last. That was just how it was.

“Oh, Jean!”

Jean turned to see Fran Knubel hurrying a cart toward her and felt a weight press the air out of her chest, because this was exactly the sort of encounter she didn’t need at the moment. Fran lived with her retired husband on Jolling Crescent, which was one of Kotemee’s better streets. Some said “the best” but Jean preferred to avoid those distinctions. Fran had obviously just had her hair done; it was all wisps and waves. She’d decked out her hip-heavy frame in summery-designery things, from fashion houses Jean had never heard of and didn’t care to, and presented herself in full makeup, with opal earrings. Oh, and Jean could see now an opal dolphin brooch. All this for a morning trip to the grocer’s.

“Jean, did you see they had California oranges on sale back there?”

“No, Fran, I wasn’t looking for oranges.” Jean glanced into Fran’s cart and saw several flimsy plastic bags stuffed with fist-sized vine-ripened tomatoes and Chilean peaches and some disturbingly large zucchini. But no oranges. “Looks like you weren’t, either.”

“No, I never buy those,” said Fran. “Jim loves them, but they’re all skin as far as I’m concerned. Peel them and there’s nothing left. I prefer the satsumas, you know, those little mandarins? They’re really, really nice and you can get them in those big organic stores but they hardly ever stock them here. This is such a terrible grocer’s. Terrible. I wish we had one of those organic stores, don’t you? But they’ll never come here. Why would they? Nobody in this town would appreciate them. Well, besides us.”

Jean nodded and looked off toward the breads. Implicit in Fran’s helpful alert about the sale-priced, all-skin navels was the understanding that Jean-and-Milt had less money than Fran-and-Jim, and might appreciate a heads-up on the opportunity to save a few precious cents on produce. Fran Knubel was just full of the sort of help and counsel that made you feel like a total fool who’d stumbled into all the wrong choices in life. It was one of the few drawbacks of living in the sort of pretty, small town to which people retired that once someone like Fran arrived, as she had some years before, you could never fully be rid of her—every time you turned around she was at the grocer’s, at the bookstore, at your mother’s funeral—and every year was one more year of wishing that she and Jim would unretire and move back to wherever they had come from. And what made it that much worse for Jean was the fact that Fran did genuinely seem to like her and enjoy her company. She would come into the studio-shop two or three times a week, apparently just to chat. The curse of having a shop open to the public was that the public could be anybody; you couldn’t jump up from your stool when she was about to walk in and rush to shut the door going, “Oh, sorry, Fran. Not you.” Although she had also, over the years, bought several expensive ceramics by Jean and seemed quite delighted with them, which made Jean feel even more guilty. Really, the dismay of seeing Fran was always multilayered. Maybe that was why it felt so heavy.

“So,” said Fran, “are you doing a full stock-up or are you just getting something special for dinner? We could go ’round together. And by the way,” she leaned in and touched Jean on the wrist, “I read they have chicken wings for two dollars off a pound.”

“I’m so stupid,” Jean blurted.

“What?”

“I left my wallet in the car.”

“You have your purse, though,” said Fran, helpfully pointing.

“I know.” Jean leaned her cart into a hard U-turn around a barrel of dried figs. “But when I paid for gas I left the wallet on the seat. Isn’t that dumb? You go ahead and maybe I’ll catch up.”

The morning sun wasn’t that hot, but Jean thought she would bake sitting in her car in the parking lot, so she rolled down the two front windows before she pulled out her phone. Then she punched in Welland’s direct number. It rang only once.

“Constable Horemarsh.”

Jean knew it killed Welland to have to say constable when his brother got to say chief. Even sergeant would have been better. “Hi, there,” she said. “It’s Jean. Just calling to see how are things coming on finding Cheryl Nunley. Any luck yet?”

“No, no luck yet. No. Sorry. No.” Welland’s voice had the tone he got when he was saying only part of what he wanted to say, and the part he wasn’t saying was the much bigger part. It was a quality of compression, as if his voice were a grilled cheese sandwich being pressed into the pan.

“Oh, well, is there any trouble? I mean, is there something you need from me? I tried to tell you everything I know but maybe . . .”

On the other end of the phone Welland sighed, and through the phone it sounded like a sudden windstorm in Jean’s ear. “I haven’t even started looking yet.”

“Oh, but—”

“No, I want to look. I wish I was doing it right now, instead of packing up Billy Walker for one more kindergarten cookie bang.” Billy Walker was Welland’s little dummy boy, made out of foam and clothes from the Goodwill, which he stored in a suitcase and took into classrooms to talk about traffic safety. The younger children loved Billy, and they always got to eat cookies when he and Constable Horemarsh visited; that’s what Welland was referring to with the mention of cookie. As for bang, that was just Welland expressing his frustration. “But I can’t,” he continued. “Before I start working on this I have to get trained on the system, and they haven’t had time to train me yet.”

“What system?” said Jean.

“It’s a system. Does it matter what system? Do you need to know the name of it? CPIC. There, does that help? Does that make things clearer? I haven’t been trained on the CPIC system, which ties into the RMS and the PIP and the NCIC. All those are cross-border data-archive and info-retrieval systems. And I haven’t been trained on any of them, and I’m not doing anything until I’m trained. Because this might be my only chance to get trained.”

Jean watched people coming out of the Sobeys in case one of them happened to be Fran Knubel, although it probably wasn’t time just yet. “Isn’t there anything you can do, though? Until you get trained, I mean.”

“Like what—checking on the Internet like some fourteen-year-old kid? That’s not really police work, is it? That’s not what I’ve been waiting all this time for.”

“No, I guess not.”

“If I’m going to do this I’m going to do it right, okay?” At the end of the phone Welland said nothing for a moment and then he sighed again. It was a long, deep sigh but not nearly as loud this time, more of a surrender sigh, which was heartbreaking to Jean. “I’m sorry to be harsh with you, Jeanie. ’Cause it’s not your fault. I’m just a bit aggravated because he said he’d train me yesterday—I need two sessions but that was supposed to be the first one—and then he called and said he had to push it off, and now I’m just waiting.”

“Who said? Who’s supposed to train you?”

“Ted Yongdale. He just made inspector so I guess he’s all of a sudden busy.”

Jean knew Ted Yongdale. He was a perfect sweetheart who’d once tried to date her when Milt was off at teacher’s college. That was nearly thirty years ago but he still smiled at her whenever they crossed paths. It was one of those little inconsequential things that lifted Jean’s spirits every now and again, and she knew it did something for Ted Yongdale, too.

“Okay, you just keep hanging in there, Welland. And how’s everything going with finding a band for the picnic?”

Welland sighed. “I’m still looking. No one plays Garth Brooks anymore.”

“Well, that’s understandable.”

After they said their goodbyes, Jean closed her phone and opened it right back up, called the Kotemee police reception, and had Melissa connect her with Ted Yongdale. While she was waiting she gazed out her window and noticed a bronze Cadillac SUV that looked a lot like Fran Knubel’s parked three spaces over.

“Inspector Yongdale.”

Jean heard the faintest chuckle in Ted’s voice, as though he was awfully pleased with himself. “Ted,” she said, “it’s Jean Horemarsh. I’ll bet it feels real good to say inspector now, congratulations.”

“Oh, hey, Jean. Yeah, thanks. Been a while coming, for sure. Sorry to hear about your mother, by the way.”

“Are you supposed to be training Welland right now on the CPIC?”

That seemed to bring Ted up short. “On the what?” he said.

“It’s called the CPIC system. I’m sure you’ve heard of it.”

“Yeah, I’m just surprised to hear it coming out of you, is all.”

“Oh, well, you’ll get a real earful out of me if you don’t get down to training him like you said you would. Here all this time I thought you were the nicest man in Kotemee, and now I don’t know.”

It didn’t take long for Ted to promise to get Welland up to speed on the CPIC and whatever else he needed, pronto. And before she hung up, Jean did her best to bat her eyelashes through the phone with her voice, just to make sure Ted knew there were no hard feelings. Then, as she was putting her phone in her purse, Jean saw Fran coming out of the Sobeys and heading right for her with her cart. She twisted the key in the ignition just as Fran saw her and waved.

“Hey, Fran,” she called as she backed out of her spot, “I just came out myself, I don’t know how I missed you.” Then Jean accelerated out of there, cursing under breath because now she was going to have to drive nine miles to Hillmount and shop in their dinky little A&P.

Jean sat at a picnic table in Corkin Park, on the west side of Kotemee, with little strips of paper on which she’d written the names of her friends, trying them in different orders to see if that would help make things clear for her. She’d finished shopping and knew her groceries were gradually warming in the car, the frozen juice going soft and the red leaf lettuce wilting, but this question of who first and who next was plaguing her, and she knew she couldn’t move forward with anything until she’d sorted it out.

The slips of paper weren’t working, though. It was becoming clear to Jean that solving this problem wasn’t going to be a matter of feel, the way she so often worked when she was trying to decide on this or that arrangement of leaves in a ceramic, or the name for a piece, or whether it would be glazed in green or white or vellum gray. She was going to have to be more commonsensical and put aside her qualmish worries about being fair. Jean gathered up the strips of paper and mushed them into a tiny ball between her fingers.

So . . .

Natalie seemed an obvious person to start with, because she was such a dear—no, thought Jean, that was thinking emotionally. Was there any practical reason to consider? Handiness—Natalie lived four blocks away—was all she could think of. No less significant a consideration could there possibly be. But it was also no reason to rule her out. So, for the present: Natalie was an option . . .

Louise was arguably just as handy as Natalie; five blocks east or four blocks north, it hardly made any difference. But Jean could see a very obvious reason not to do Louise first. It was the whole matter of her affair with Milt. People who knew about the goings-on between those two—she imagined there were certainly a few still working at Hern Regional High School—would be asked if they knew of anyone with a motive to harm Louise. Harm would be how they would think of it. And Jean’s name was sure to come up. It would be difficult, she thought, to convince suspicious people that she hadn’t even really thought about the affair in years, even though the very fact that Louise was her good friend should have been evidence itself. And if the police started nosing around (she couldn’t assume favors just because she was the chief’s sister; that wouldn’t be fair to Andrew Jr.), there was a chance she wouldn’t be able to finish what she’d started. So, under the circumstances: Louise might have to be last.

The fact that Adele lived in the city was a mark both for and against her, Jean thought. For her, in that the element of distance would obscure any connection between the two of them. Against her, in that it was such a bother to have to drive into the city and deal with all that terrible traffic. Honestly, it was a full-day ordeal. And Adele was always so busy, it was hard to fit into her schedule. Sitting at the picnic table, Jean rolled the ball of names between her fingers and thought, well, inconvenience was hardly a good enough reason to exclude Adele from consideration. So: Adele, an option . . .

Now Dorothy, thought Jean. Dorothy . . . Living out along one of the rural concessions, not right in town, not too far a drive. Working hard to take care of Roy; now there was a bad situation that was only going to get worse. Oh, she put on a brave, no-nonsense face, but Jean could tell from Dorothy’s eyes that she was starting to despair. “Big Boy” was close to three hundred pounds now. He could still dress and feed himself, but for how long? And when he got angry he was like one of those movie monsters tearing up everything in his path, except there was so little left now because their money was running out and he’d already smashed or torn or kicked so many of their nicest things. Poor Dorothy deserved to be rescued from all of that. She deserved to be treated to a special, joyful, passionate experience, and then freed . . . All things considered: Dorothy was a definite possibility.

Last, Jean put her mind to Cheryl Nunley. She thought that if she could choose someone for purely emotional reasons, it would have to be Cheryl. Because there was so much Jean felt a need to make up for. The abandonment of her friend at the darkest moments of her life. The subsequent decades of neglect. The hateful lack of curiosity about what had become of someone with whom she had shared so much formative teenage experience. It was as if she had worn Cheryl like a favorite pair of shoes and then kicked her to the back of the closet.

And yet, it was hard to imagine Cheryl being an option in the immediate future because Jean had no idea where she lived, and there was no telling how long it would take Welland to find her. The possibility existed that she wasn’t even alive, which was just awful to think about. So Jean had to accept the facts: Cheryl was on the back burner . . .

As she sat at the picnic table, Jean let her eyes drift over to two men who stood chatting by the southern edge of the park near the line of scrub brush while each of their dogs, a boxer and a retriever, rolled around and chewed on sticks for lack of any organized activity. It was irritating for Jean to watch. The men had gone out to take their dogs for a walk and here they were standing. They were having a nice stand. Maybe it was just her mood talking, but it seemed to Jean that if you were going to do something, you should just get on with doing it.

She stood up from the picnic table and tossed her little wad of names into a garbage bin. The decision was made: it was going to be Dorothy first. Jean just hoped that somehow she could make it up to Cheryl, if she ever saw her again.