Verdict in Blood - By Gail Bowen Page 0,16

Signe tells me, you weren’t that close to my mother. She had friends and family here. Doesn’t it strike you as bizarre that she felt she couldn’t go to the people who knew her best?”

“Not at all,” Hilda said flatly. “It strikes me as eminently sensible. Your mother knew me as a person of probity who had no axe to grind. Now, let’s deal with the situation at hand. When Eric Fedoruk came to see me this afternoon, we talked about the task your mother set me.”

“Eric came to see you?” Lucy leaped to her feet. She seemed close to tears. “He hasn’t even returned our calls.”

Signe Rayner half-rose from her chair. “Lucy, don’t.”

“Why not? What did he tell you about us, Miss McCourt?”

“That’s enough, Lucy.” Signe’s voice was commanding. “We can talk about this later.”

Lucy walked over to Hilda. “Miss McCourt, don’t believe everything you hear.”

At close to five-foot-eleven, Lucy was almost a foot taller than my old friend, but Hilda took charge of the situation. “I’ve learned to make my own assessments of people, Lucy. Now, while I’m truly sorry for your loss, my purpose in coming here this afternoon is not simply to commiserate. Last night, when your mother gave me Signe’s book, she also gave me a note authorizing me to do what I deemed necessary to protect her interests.” Hilda turned to Signe. “I came here today to let all of you know that’s exactly what I plan to do.”

Lucy and Signe exchanged glances, then Signe thanked us, quite formally, for coming, and she and Lucy saw us out.

Silenced by the misery we had felt in Justine Blackwell’s home, Hilda and I walked down the front path. Out of nowhere, another image from “Picture Time” flashed through my mind. “Our last smiles frozen in Kodachrome.” As we turned onto the sidewalk, I found myself thinking that there wasn’t much about painful leave-takings that Lucy Blackwell didn’t understand.

Hilda’s musings had obviously been running parallel to mine. “Two very unhappy women,” she said. “And I don’t believe the genesis of their problems was their mother’s death.”

“No,” I agreed. “Whatever’s troubling the Blackwell sisters goes way back.”

Hilda touched my arm. “And there’s more trouble coming to them,” she said. “Look over there.”

A van painted in the style of comic-book high realism that Taylor’s art teacher called jailhouse art had pulled up across the road. The vehicle was, by anyone’s reckoning, a mean machine, and as its driver bounded out and started towards us, there was no denying that he was one tough customer. He was of middle height, with a shaved head, a full moustache, and the powerful physique of a bodybuilder.

As he brushed past us, I saw that the parts of his skin not hidden by his Levi’s and white V-necked T-shirt were purpley-blue with tattoos. He vaulted up the front steps of the Blackwell house and knocked on the door.

“Another condolence call,” I said.

“I wonder what the Blackwell sisters will make of this one?” Hilda said. She turned to me. “I assume you can guess at that man’s identity, Joanne.”

“Wayne J. Waters?”

“In the flesh,” Hilda said.

Patient as a choirboy, Wayne J. waited for someone to respond to his knock on the door. When it was apparent that no answer was forthcoming, he pounded his closed fist into the open palm of his other hand and headed back down the walk.

As his van screeched back towards Albert Street, the words painted in red on the back of the vehicle leaped out at me: “Every Saint Has a Past. Every Sinner Has a Future.” It seemed Lucy Blackwell hadn’t cornered the market on folk wisdom.

That night, after Taylor’s school clothes were laid out for the next day her backpack filled with her new school supplies, and she’d been bathed and tucked into bed with her cats, Bruce and Benny, and Hilda had been rung in to tell the next adventure in the ongoing saga of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, I drove over to Alex’s apartment on Lorne Street, and we made love.

When I was twenty, I had believed that the pleasures of sex were aesthetic and athletic. Then, the prospect of being physically intimate with a man when I was past fifty and my body was no longer a delight to look at or a joy to manoeuvre had filled me with alarm. I’d been wrong to worry. With Alex, I was enjoying the best sex of my life: by turns passionate, tender, funny, restoring, and