Death in Cold Type Read online

  “Stevie…!”

  “Kidding. Ma’s just my old sparring partner.” She smiled at Sharon. “Okay, I give her credit. Kathleen’s pretty good in the mothering department. In her psychologizing way, of course. And Merritt’s mother must have recognized this. Still…” She paused. “I’m not sure my mother absorbed that one fundamental tenet of dealing with teenagers—if you nag them long enough, they’ll do just the opposite.” Stevie gazed out the window and thought with misgiving how true that was in her case. “Anyway—”

  “Are you finished with that cup?”

  “Oh, I guess.”

  Sharon took the cup and turned to the kitchen. “By the way, speaking of Michael, he’s given me notice. Well, notice of sorts.”

  Stevie sat upright. “But…why?”

  “He really didn’t say. You know Michael. He’s sort of—”

  “Self-contained? Private? Still waters run deep?” Stevie could feel a flush of colour rising, as it often did lately when she thought about Michael. She gathered the collar of her bathrobe around her neck and rose from the table.

  “But he must have given some idea,” she insisted, stepping to the kitchen. She watched Sharon scrubbing at some encrustation on the stove. “It can’t have been your work—”

  “No, it wasn’t my work.”

  “Then…?”

  “He said he expected to be moving. Around the end of the year.” Sharon shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. I’ve got a waiting list of people who want me, actually.”

  “Moving? But where?”

  “Didn’t say.”

  “You could still clean in any new house.”

  “My sense was that he might be leaving Winnipeg.”

  “Really?” Stevie gnawed at the side of her finger. “Odd. On the phone the other day, he said he wanted to talk to me about something, or tell me something.” She groaned inside, thinking of the bombshell she had kept from him for a dozen years and planned to keep forever. “I thought maybe he was going to tell me I was hopeless as a photographer,” she said instead. “And that I should quit his course.”

  “Your photos look fine to me.”

  Stevie glanced at her sharply.

  “Well, I do notice some things, you know.”

  • • •

  Stevie poured Rice Krispies and milk into a bowl her mother had left out on the table. She folded the Citizen to the Diversions page, thinking fleetingly of her friend Leo’s remark that the whole newspaper might as well be called Diversions, and cast her eyes over the People column. Names in bold type beckoned—Joan Collins, Linda Evans, Larry Hagman, Princess Diana—but the gossip proved unalluring, the type greyed and blurred. Thoughts of Michael banished even the provocative envelope so near her elbow.

  What was Michael Rossiter doing?

  Not for the first time she wondered what was going on in his head.

  She thought back to the barbecue in Michael’s yard four months earlier. She hadn’t even wanted to attend. But she had run into Michael at McNally’s bookstore in Osborne Village a few days earlier that warm middle of May, the harbinger of what would turn into a long hot summer—she, home from Toronto, in the process of divorcing her husband, staying with her parents while she pondered her future—and had found herself as dazed as a deer in headlamps in his presence. It had been twelve years since she saw him last. The brave faces of their airport parting seared her memory. So, too, did the letter she wrote him from Baltimore. But he seemed to bear no ill will. She could find no excuse for not attending his party. Then, at the barbecue, feeling awkward among Michael’s friends, some of them from the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, others fellow photographers, virtually everyone a stranger, she had overimbibed white wine and turned into—she kicked herself the next morning—a gibbering idiot.

  None of the musicians scattered about Michael’s lawn that evening had talked about music. Only the photographers talked about photography. She realized—and Michael later confirmed—that the orchestra members, being roughly equal in talent and ability and part of a collective that in most cases blunted any attempt at personal expression, made their hobbies their passions, almost aggressively so. Stevie dipped in and out of fierce conversations about gardening, cottage renovation, vintage motorcycles, and then learned that Michael gave lessons—no, tutorials, more one-on-one—in photography. She’d been surprised. She remembered Michael’s bullying father, at the time owner and publisher of the Citizen, insisting his teenaged son spend summers in the early 70s working at the family business, as copy boy, as junior reporter, as apprentice photographer, and Michael hating it, working under sufferance, fretting to get back to his music. And now here he was teaching photography.

  She had been in a little conversational knot, she recalled, wine glass in one hand, a chicken wing in the other, the air redolent of lilacs and barbecue smoke. Michael had been talking about some of his photographs on display at the Floating Gallery downtown. There had been another woman with them, Caitlin Somebodyorother, a bland blonde beauty, looking rather too ardently at Michael (she’d thought), and a man, a trombonist with the WSO, who had thick, fine, waist-length black hair so beautifully tended that Stevie, in her giddy state, had wondered if coiffure-cultivating wasn’t his avocation. Gaping, she’d almost missed Michael’s comment that he was thinking of stopping giving photography tutorials.

  “Oh, no!” Stevie had squealed. She remembered it as a squeal. It certainly sounded like a squeal to her ears—girlish, high-pitched. She stared at her Rice Krispies, now a beige soup, and squirmed with mortification at the memory. “Oh, you mustn’t!” She could hear herself again. “I’d love to take your course!”

  Michael had regarded her with a half-smile and half-raised eyebrows. The sun beginning its descent through the trees had burnished his crop of unruly blonde hair, an aureole pierced by a ridiculous cowlick, which his passing hand had unwittingly tweezed.

  “Sure,” he had said with a low laugh that broke the embarrassed silence her sudden zeal had caused. “If that’s what you want.”

  It was not what she’d wanted. Not what she’d intended at any rate. She knew her way around a camera. As an interior designer, Stevie used her Nikon occasionally as an aide-mémoire when she was space-planning, but she had never thought of her camera as anything other than a minor work tool and a vacation companion. Certainly she had never entertained the idea of a camera being anything more for her. But she could hardly have told Michael all that, could hardly have expressed a changed mind in front of him without compounding her embarrassment.

  As it happened, she had brought her camera with her from Toronto to Winnipeg. And her elder brother, Robert, like her father a plastic surgeon, but long gone to the glitter that was a medical practice in the U.S., had built, then abandoned, a darkroom in the Lord basement years before during a brief teenage camera craze.

  Convenient.

  Well, she was at loose ends. And being near Michael again, slipping back into his life, had an irresistible allure. God, what have I done? she had asked herself when the buzz from the wine had worn off and Michael had started the fireworks, a quaint reminder of their childhood days when such displays attended Victoria Day, not Canada Day. Would this be happening if I’d told him what I’d done all those years ago? At McNally’s he wouldn’t have cheerfully invited me to anything.

  Stevie lifted her head from her soggy cereal and looked through the window, down the lawn where two inky crows, like portents in a literary novel, scuffled over some scrap of food. Past the trees with their autumn tint, the Assiniboine River dappled in the morning sun. She was enjoying the photography. The assignments, the darkroom tasks, had given some shape to her days—at least they had until Michael had gone off to Europe for the summer. But now, she thought with a little fillip of joy, this evening, the tutorials, the proximity, would resume. Unless…

  Why the hell was he letting Sharon go?

  “Are you going to finish that?” The very person was at her elbow, jolting her from her
reverie.

  “No.” Stevie looked down at the bowl and felt her stomach turn. “I think a piece of dry toast is about all I can stand.” She rose from the table.

  “There’s still some banana bread left in the fridge.” Sharon lifted the envelope. “I think this is addressed to you.”

  “I know.”

  “Feels funny.”

  “I know.”

  Sharon flicked her a glance. “Aren’t you going to open it?”

  Stevie stared at envelope and sighed. “I’d better get it over with, I guess.” She took her unused knife and ran it under the envelope’s sealed flap while Sharon loaded the tray with the remains of the morning meal. A faintly malodorous puff of air escaped through the slash and pricked Stevie’s nostrils. She recoiled, her memory groping to label the familiar smell. What was it? The answer eluded her. She hesitated, considered putting the envelope down the garburator.

  Was this a trick?

  Cautiously, she pushed her thumb and forefinger into the envelope and caught the edge of the contents, two sheets of thick paper. The edges felt peculiar, crusty. As she pulled the papers from the envelope a fine grey dust followed, trickling in a thin stream to the carpet. She heard Sharon cluck.

  She couldn’t read either page at first. The lettering on each—gothic and official-looking—was largely obscured by splotches and speckles, grey, black, white, irregular and grainy, like paint thrown against a canvas in some abstract expressionist work.

  And then it registered. The source of the peculiar odour.

  “How did he get this! How did he get his hands on this!” Her hands shook as she threw one of the papers against the tablecloth. “That bastard! That miserable bastard! This one is supposed to come to me directly from the court!”

  “What is it?” Sharon abandoned her task and bent down to pick up the papers, both of which had fallen to the carpet.

  “My divorce certificate and our marriage certificate!”

  “But what’s on them?”

  “What’s on them?” Stevie repeated. “What’s on them? I’ll tell you what’s on them! It’s birdshit! They’re both covered with birdshit!”

  “Oooh.” Sharon let them fall back to the floor.

  “He’s put them in Charlie’s cage. That’s what he’s done. He’s lined the parrot cage with them! He knows how much I loathed that disgusting bird.” Stevie thrust at the air with the knife she was still holding in her other hand. It gleamed in a shaft of light. “I’ll kill him. If I ever see him again, I’ll kill him!”

  Sharon turned away. Stevie heard a suppressed snort.

  “Are you laughing? Do you find this funny?”

  Sharon snorted again, more loudly this time, and turned to face Stevie, her hand covering her mouth. She nodded. Her eyes were beginning to water.

  “This is not funny!”

  Sharon’s laughter broke through her hand. “Sure it is! It’s a riot!” she spluttered after a moment, trying to control her mirth. “But don’t you see, Stevie?” She gasped for air. “You’re divorced. You’ve got what you wanted. This doesn’t matter.” She gestured toward the defaced document. “You’re divorced now. You’re…a divorcée!”

  Stevie was silent a while, watching dubiously as Sharon removed a tissue from her sleeve and dabbed along her eyes. “Yes, I am, aren’t I,” she said at last. It was an affirmation, not a question. Her breathing grew more shallow, calmer. “I’m divorced.” She repeated the words under her breath like a mantra.

  “So…?” Sharon cocked her head.

  Somewhere, near the pit of her stomach, a feeling of well-being, such as she hadn’t felt in a long time, surged and spread through Stevie’s limbs, supplanting the anger. It swirled up through her chest and face, rising to the very roots of her hair. She could sense a smile pushing at the contours of her lips.

  “There. See, Stevie? It’s over. La, la, how the life goes on.”

  “Yes, it does, doesn’t it?” Michael’s angelic face suddenly shimmered before her. “Yes!” She grabbed Sharon’s forearms and together they twirled around the dining room table cheering and stomping. Stevie’s bathrobe opened and flew around her like a dervish’s skirt.

  “I’m free! I’m free!”

  “You’re free! You’re free!”

  They broke apart, laughing.

  “I’d still like to know how Sangster got his mitts on my divorce certificate, though.” Stevie paused, catching her breath.

  “Bureaucrats, probably. You’ve never met such boneheads. Believe me, I know. They probably mailed it to your old address.”

  “Or something.”

  “Or something.”

  2

  The End

  Kathleen Lord took the salad bowl from Stevie’s hand, but kept her eyes fixed on her husband across the table. Max, however, was concentrated on stirring the salad dressing. The salad dressing did not need stirring.

  “Well, anyway,” she said, her bosom heaving with a sigh, “it’s a sad day. That’s all I can say. A sad day.”

  “No, Mom, it’s a happy day.”

  “There’s never been a divorce in this family.”

  “What? Half my cousins are divorced. Or on their way to divorce. Or should be divorced if they had any brains.”

  “I mean this family, Stevie. Your brothers and their wives. Your father and I. My parents. Your father’s parents. My sisters—”

  “What did you want me to do? Stay married to maintain some unbroken string of domestic bliss? Get into the Guinness Book of World Records?”

  Kathleen attacked the undressed lettuce leaves on her plate and said nothing, her mouth being otherwise occupied. Stevie glanced out the window at the evening shadows stealing across the lawn. She had spent the day in a kind of euphoria, craving activity as an expression of her new-found bliss, her hangover vanished. She had gone for a run around Assiniboine Park. She had raked the leaves on the front lawn—a first—confounding her father, who thought GreenCare came on Thursdays. And without being prompted, as she had through much of the summer, she had prepared dinner—well, most of it—choosing as a celebratory dish her screw-the-diet favourite, veal piccatta with noodles alfredo. For dessert, she popped out to Baked Expectations and bought cheesecake. She had set the table with the good china and the fine silverware and filled a vase with the last of the mums from the garden.

  “What’s the occasion?” her father had asked, stepping into the kitchen as she was flouring the veal.

  “You’ll see.”

  She had stuffed Sangster’s envelope with its contents into the silver drawer in the sideboard to be removed at an opportune moment. That moment came after the veal and before the salad, by which time her mother could no longer sustain a disinterested composure. Stevie made her announcement. Her parents evinced little enchantment. She didn’t really care. She was celebrating for herself. She removed the envelope from the drawer. Through the last year of her marriage she had spared her parents the finer details of Sangster’s belligerence, the crude suggestions scribbled on notes, the late-night phone calls, the unscheduled appearances at her office. Now that the divorce was final, now that no spiteful last-minute delay could be negotiated, she would give Kathleen and Max a tiny insight into the manners of David Sangster, Toronto developer and businessman. Her parents reacted, in the first instance, much as Sharon Bean had that morning—with perplexity.

  “What your charming former son-in-law has done, beloved parents, is line his parrot cage with our marriage certificate and my divorce certificate, which he somehow obtained before I did. Want a closer look, Mom?”

  Her mother, who had lifted for closer examination the glasses on a gold chain around her neck, merely wrinkled her nose and waved the offending document away.

  “I’m disgusted.” Her father frowned. “I didn’t think he could be so petty.”

  “Perhaps he’s just very disappointed. Lashing out.” Kathleen inspected her salad fork.

  “Oh, Mother, really!”

  “He
sounded so sincere that time he phoned here,” Kathleen pressed on. “He was practically crying, you know.”

  “Yes, you’ve said. And if you say it again, I’m going to rip my head off and put it on this plate.”

  “I merely mention it.”

  “Daddy!”

  Max rolled his eyes. “Kate, it’s all over. Let’s not go on about him, shall we? At least not for the rest of this meal.”

  And so her mother had managed silence for the time it took to pass the salad around the table. When she spoke, it was to sidle into a topic of related contention. They might have talked about the latest Scorsese film, or Carol Shields’s novel, Swann, which they were both reading in paperback, or what her mother was going to wear to Saturday’s opening of Galleries Portáge, the new downtown mall. They did not.

  “So, then,” she addressed Stevie, putting down her salad fork and reaching for her water glass, “what are you going to do?”

  “In what sense?”

  “Well, are you going back to Toronto?” Kathleen sipped the water. The ice tinkled.

  “I don’t know.”

  Yabu Pushelberg, the design firm she worked for, had generously given her a leave of absence while she sorted out her life. But she realized that after nine years in Toronto she had many colleagues but no true friends. The people she and David saw socially were usually his clients, sometimes hers. They had lived on a lovely street in the Beaches, at her insistence. (She resisted his entreaties to build a new, modern, monster home in some Christforsaken development he had a financial investment in.) But though the Beaches, with its cute stores and lakefront boardwalk, had the charming appearance of a community, it felt faux at times. Her neighbours retreated behind the doors of their character homes. She never did see a welcome wagon.

  “We’re happy to have you here as long as you like, honey,” Max interjected, pushing his salad plate to one side.

  “Thank you, Daddy.” She smiled at him, then turned her head to the other end of the table. “Mother?”