Verdict in Blood - By Gail Bowen Page 0,27

main floor of his building and have a drink.”

“Did you go?”

“No. At that point, I’d had enough. But when I started to say my goodbyes, Lucy Blackwell came over and put her arms around me. Joanne, it was the strangest thing. She was almost weeping, and she said, ‘Hilda, don’t be mad at us. It’s for your own good. My mother left everything in such a mess, and my sisters and I would feel terrible if anything happened to you.’ ”

I looked across at her. In the dying light, a truth that I tried to banish was apparent. While Hilda’s spirit was as robust as ever, there was no denying that physically she was becoming more fragile. I didn’t want anything to happen to her either.

“Let’s go inside,” I said. “Even on a night like this, it’s possible to get a chill.”

CHAPTER

5

The next afternoon, when Taylor came home from school she grabbed an apple and her cats and headed out to her studio to work. She went back after dinner. She continued the pattern all week. “I want the painting to be ready for Eli as soon as he comes back,” she said.

Taylor wasn’t the only busy member of our household. As the first Friday after Labour Day approached, it was clear that the aimlessness and languor of summer was well and truly over. Angus’s football team started practice, and his girlfriend, Leah, came back from theatre school in Toronto. I sorted my classes out and began to lecture in earnest. We all took turns visiting Eli.

Hilda spent Wednesday and Thursday downtown, continuing her investigation into Justine Blackwell’s affairs. She described her movement back and forth between the courthouse on Victoria Avenue and the shabby storefront offices on Rose Street that harboured Culhane House as spider-like. In her attempt to connect the disparate strands in the complicated web of relationships that Justine had established in her life, Hilda talked to everyone she could find who had known the dead woman, from the small circle of colleagues, family, and friends who had watched with dismay as she metamorphosed from figure of judicial rectitude into eccentric advocate for prisoners’ rights, to the ex-prisoners and their families and lawyers who exulted as Justine embraced their cause.

Often Hilda arrived hard on the heels of the police, whose frustration as they continued to come up empty-handed in their own investigations was growing. They weren’t short on suspects. Justine Blackwell had spent the last night of her life in a room filled with people she had sent to prison. The final year of Justine’s life might have been given over to making amends, but delayed charity can be cold comfort. Most of the guests at Justine’s party would have known only too well the truth of the old saw that “a man that studieth revenge keeps his own wounds green.” They would have known, too, that in the course of history few places have proven themselves more congenial to the study of revenge than the slammer.

The theory that Justine’s death had been an act of prisoner vengeance was given credibility by the nature of the weapon the police now believed had been used to kill her. On the night of Justine’s final party, Eric Fedoruk had presented her with handsomely engraved marble-based scales. The doorman at the hotel had seen Justine put the scales on the seat beside her when she stepped into her BMW, but they were nowhere in evidence when the police examined the car after Justine’s body was found. The scales still hadn’t been recovered, but the forensics unit, having examined both Justine’s injuries and photographs of Eric Fedoruk’s presentation at the banquet, had concluded that the marble base could have inflicted the fatal wounds. A healthy percentage of those who had watched the presentation had proven themselves adept at the art of assault with a deadly weapon. An equally healthy percentage had no alibi whatsoever.

The police weren’t alone in feeling disappointed that the truth about Justine was eluding them. Friday morning, when I came back from taking Rose around the lake, Hilda was sitting at the dining-room table surrounded by library books.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“I’m trying to unearth a few appropriate passages for Justine’s memorial service. It’s tomorrow.”

“I saw the notice in the paper.” I sat down in the chair across from her. “Do you realize we haven’t really talked about Justine all week?”

“You’ve had enough on your mind with Eli,” Hilda said. “Besides, all I’d have had to contribute was a