room, solaced by quesadillas filled with Monterey Jack, onions, peppers, black olives and mushrooms. She dosed them with Mcllhenny’s Tabasco sauce.
Trudging up to the master suite for bed, she noticed the red blink of the answering machine. A familiar voice, its booming cadences balm in an icy Gilead, said: “Out in this mess chasing filthy lucre? You need a mother, and I’m back.”
Choking back a laugh, Belle went downstairs to collect the postcard. From a tourist spot on the Mediterranean, palms, sand and beach umbrellas, dated three weeks ago. “Watch the stars for me. I’ve shaped up the last kibbutz and run out of maple syrup. Love, Jesse.”
At thirty-five, Belle hadn’t been a baby when her mother had died of cancer. But with only Uncle Harold and her father as immediate family, she’d welcomed Jesse’s gruff, no-nonsense affection. In the confusion of grief, Belle had had no idea how to write an obituary, jotted the bare facts and stared bleakly. Then a mechanical whizzing had sounded from the kitchen, and soon Jesse was gripping her shoulder, easing a glass of fresh-squeezed carrot juice into her inarticulate hand. “She had a life, girl. Now drink these anti-oxidants and remember that this is for her, for your father, not you.” And a chastened daughter had summoned bit by bit her mother’s career as a legal secretary, leading her class in Toronto, a wizard of torts and public relations. Terry Palmer’s garden met the challenge of an unforgiving climate, those violet delphiniums winning prizes. Belle had passed the empty glass and completed notes back to Jesse, who read them with grunts of approval. “Where do you think you got your love of plants, Belle, out of the sky?”
Jesse had been married back in the “Stone Age,” her philandering dentist husband dead of an aneurysm at forty in his mistress’s bed. Her only boy roamed somewhere chasing a cause in Nicaragua, Chile, or other points south. Jesse waved a wrinkled hand and shrugged. “He’ll float back some day like Odysseus, and if not, good riddance to a father’s son.” With this dismissal, her hooded tortoise eyes would blink, and she’d look away. Belle had never met Pete, but his picture by Jesse’s bed, a long-haired hippie demonstrating at a peace march, showed that he was more his mother’s son.
Belle dialled her friend, received a computer voice saying that the line was not connected. She’d soon be catching up with old pals, many in retirement homes or nursing facilities. How old was Jesse? Seventy-five? Belle’s Jewish mother was as timeless as the rocks of the elemental Cambrian Shield.
That night Dr. Easton called as Belle assembled a host of vitamins on the bathroom counter. “I know you’re concerned, and I don’t think I’m breaching ethics by telling you that Miriam will be at the San for several weeks.”
Belle felt a lump rise in her throat. “And a visit?”
“Dr. Parr thinks that would be a good idea. But not until she’s settled in and therapy is underway. Wait another week.”
“Why not sooner?”
“A surgeon’s a glorified mechanic, not a psychiatrist, but I suppose that in every illness, treatment depends on the individual. Healing the mind is complex. Along with choices of drugs and therapy, some people need the constant comfort of family, if they’re used to—”
“But Miriam—”
“Has been an independent lady, I gather, from what she did confide. Aside from her daughter . . .”
I’m not chopped liver, Belle thought, then responded to the last word. “Rosanne. Has anyone called her?”
“I suggested that when we arrived. Miriam didn’t want to worry the girl with exams coming up. She’s very prone to stress.”
Belle assumed the mantle of bearer of bad tidings, never a strong suit. “I’ll take care of that, and I appreciate your going beyond the call.”
She frowned at the neon glow of eleven on the bedside clock. Wait until morning? Rosanne should have been contacted days ago. What student went to bed before midnight?
Flipping through her address book, Belle found the number Miriam had given her for emergencies. According to her roommate, yakking faster than an over-caffeinated monkey, they were pulling an all-nighter for a wicked math exam. “Rosie! Get your butt in here!” Belle heard, before she saved her ear drum by muffling the receiver.
She related the gist of the tragedy with as many encouraging notes as she could fabricate. “You’re sure she’s OK? I could get a bus in a couple of hours,” the girl said, her voice faltering, a tiny sniff revealing her distress.
“I know you want to help, but mostly she needs time, Rosanne. The doctor advises no visitors . . . just for a while,” she explained in off-hand tones. “It’s shock mostly. The death of a good friend.” Somehow she couldn’t mention that Miriam faced arrest when she left the dubious sanctuary of the hospital.
“I was away all summer on an exchange program in France, then skiing in Quebec over Christmas. I only saw her for a weekend when I came home in September to pack. Who is this guy? Mom doesn’t date.”
Belle forced a laugh to deflate the growing tension. “Listen to you, sounding like a parent. Maybe she was afraid you’d tease her.” After providing a home for her daughter through her undergraduate work at Shield University, Miriam had been only too glad to cut the apron strings and reclaim her personal life. There had been arguments over some pot found in the girl’s room, the usual debate about recreational drugs as well as Rosanne’s occasional use of uppers to stay awake studying.
Her duties over, to momentary relief, Belle climbed into the cozy king-sized waterbed which fuelled her dreams. The patio doors and the window were rimed with frosty curlicues. The room was heated by the stove downstairs, with only a wall louvre to the cathedral ceilings of the living room. She poked a cigarette into her Adolph Menjou (another moustached man, the lovable rogue) jewelled holder, her father’s present from Universal Studios Park in Florida, and poured scotch into a deceptive antique bar glass, heavy on the bottom and tapering, an illusion opposite to the murder, holding less than it appeared. The talented Nevada Barr’s mystery, Deep South, hot and humid on the Natchez Trace in Mississippi, warmed her along with Whyte and Mackay’s best.
Feeling an annoying tickle, she snagged another pumpkin-coloured ladybug from her shoulder, getting up to flick it outside onto the Papal-blessing token balcony instead of nestling it on the Dieffenbachia to winter over. The warm fall had brought a deluge, thousands of tiny rosy bodies trying to muscle in for the duration. A Japanese invader brought to fight aphids, hybrid colours and every combination of dots including none. “Too long at the fair, my dear.”
As she turned out the light, chapters later, to the soft snore of Freya on the sheepskin rug at her feet, she drifted into half-sleep, smiling to think about Jesse, then when Miriam’s hollow-faced shade appeared, shifting restlessly. The dog scrabbled after elusive rabbits in her carefree sleep. Belle’s weary eyes snapped open as a poodle scampered across the busy blackboard of her mind. Where was the creature?
Five
Those teeth. The dog had been at Petville for the extractions. Belle called the vet as coffee perked the next morning. Shana Coolidge lived on the premises, woke by five, and let recovering dogs with manners roam her apartment at will. That wouldn’t include the poodle.
“It’s been days. I was wondering why Miriam didn’t answer the phone,” Shana said. “What’s up?”
Belle resisted babbling, even to someone as trustworthy as the vet. “She’s
