Murder at the Mendel by Gail Bowen

Author:Gail Bowen
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780771013201
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Published: 2011-05-16T21:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER

7

When I read the paper’s lead story the morning of Clea’s funeral I could feel my throat closing. The police had started to give the media details about their investigation, and there weren’t many arrows pointing away from Sally and me. There was one item of hard news: Kyle, the museum guard, told the police that minutes before they arrived, the burglar alarm had gone off in the delivery area at the back of the gallery. When he went out to investigate, he saw a figure running down the hill toward the river bank. The snow was so heavy that he couldn’t give the police a description, couldn’t in fact tell for certain whether the runner had been male or female. Kyle had given chase but when he heard the siren from the police car, he returned to the gallery. The only thing that seemed to be missing from the gallery was the film from the video camera suspended over the bridal bed.

A mystery runner and an empty camera: it wasn’t much.

The human interest angle was more fertile ground. From the beginning, the local paper couldn’t seem to get enough of Clea and Sally. The morning after the murder, the obituary column had carried the details of Clea’s funeral: services were to be conducted at the University Women’s Centre by a woman named Vivian Ludlow from the radical feminist community. She taught a course called Human Justice, and I knew her slightly from the university. Interment was at a cemetery on the east side of the city. While men were welcome at the interment, they would not be permitted to attend the funeral service.

The paper managed to repeat the details of the funeral arrangements in most of the stories about Clea’s life and death. Those few lines always gave a titillating but not libellous spin to their stories. Clea’s association with Sally at womanswork; the arson that destroyed their gallery; the public outcry against the bisexual imagery of Erotobiography: all were suddenly set against a dark feminist world, a world where men were not welcome. It was hot stuff.

The Righteous Protester wasn’t hot stuff. Even on the day of his funeral, he only rated a column and a half on page three. His name was Reg Helms, and as I read his obituary, I was struck again with how sad and stunted his life had been: a childless marriage to a woman who had died the year before of cancer, no friends to speak of, and a dead-end clerical job with a company called Peter’s Pumpkin Seeds. Reg Helms was a great writer of letters to the newspaper; and every talkshow host in town recognized his voice. His preoccupation was our disintegrating society, and it was a theme he played with variations. Sometimes it was Quebec that was destroying the country, sometimes ethnic groups or Aboriginal peoples, but the subject that really warmed his heart was sexual permissiveness. Sally’s show had been a holy mission for him. He had been fifty-four years old when he died.

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