down the street. Angus was waiting for me in the front hall when I went inside.
“Has anybody heard from Eli?” he asked.
“He’s back,” I said. “Too bad you didn’t get up earlier. Alex was here. He could have filled you in.”
Angus looked away. “I was waiting till he left.”
“Waiting till Alex left? Why would you do that?”
“Because I need to talk to you alone.”
“Okay.” I put my arm around his waist. My son had shot up over the summer. He was close to six feet now, but he was still my baby. “Let’s sit down in the kitchen so we can look each other in the eye.”
As a rule, Angus met problems head on, but it took him a while to zero in on this one. He went to the fridge, poured himself a glass of juice, drained it, and then filled his glass again. Finally he said, “Something happened at the football game yesterday that I should have told you and Alex about.”
“Go on,” I said.
“You’re not going to like it.” He leaned forward. “Mum, when you asked me why Eli ran off at the game, I said I didn’t know.”
“But you did.”
He nodded. “Remember those college kids who ran out on the field just before half-time?”
“Of course,” I said. “I was surprised they didn’t get thrown out. They were pretty drunk.”
“But everybody thought they were funny,” Angus said. “Those guys sitting behind Eli and me were really cheering them on.”
“They weren’t exactly sober themselves,” I said.
Angus traced a line through the condensation on his glass. “When Eli and I were coming back with our nachos, another man ran out on the field. The guys in the row behind us started to cheer – the way they’d done for the college kids. Then one of them said, ‘It’s only a fucking Indian,’ and everybody stopped cheering.”
“And Eli heard them.”
Angus nodded. “At first, I thought he was going to cry. Then he just went ballistic. Do you know what he said, Mum? He said, ‘Sometimes I’d like to kill you all.’ ”
I felt a sudden heaviness in my limbs. “He didn’t mean it, Angus. I’ve blown up like that when I was mad. So have you. It’s just a figure of speech.”
Angus shook his head dismissively. “I know he didn’t mean it. Eli wouldn’t kill anybody. What pissed me off was the way he just lumped me in with those jerks. I was ready to go up and pound those mouthy guys into the ground, but Eli didn’t give me a chance. He acted as if we were all the same.”
“Well, we’re not,” I said. “But Eli will never know that if you bail on him now.”
After Angus went upstairs to shower, I poured myself another glass of iced tea and turned on the news. There was nothing there to cheer me up. The media had discovered Justine Blackwell’s murder, and judging from the play it was getting on the radio, her death was going to be the biggest story to hit our city in a long time. A breathless account of the bizarre circumstances in which the body was discovered was followed by an obituary which moved smoothly from the highlights of Justine Blackwell’s legal career to a synopsis of the life and loves of her celebrated daughter, Lucy. Finally, there were excerpts from a press conference with Detective Robert Hallam in which he announced that the police were following up a number of leads and asking for the public’s help.
The saturation coverage of Justine Blackwell’s death didn’t leave much time for the other big news story, the heat. At mid-morning the temperature in Regina was 32 degrees Celsius and climbing. The last day of the holiday weekend was going to be a sizzler, and there was no relief in sight. I turned off the radio, called Taylor, and told her that if she wanted to hit the pool for her daily swimming lesson, now was the time.
When I’d been looking for a larger place after I adopted Taylor, one of the features that had made this house affordable was its backyard swimming pool. By the mid-nineties, prudent people had filled in their energy-wasting pools, but the owners of this house hadn’t been prudent, and I’d been able to snap it up at a bargain price. Angus and I had counted it a privilege to be able to swim whenever the fancy struck us, but no one took greater pleasure in the pool than Taylor. All summer, she had