Deadly Appearances Read Online Free

shoulders of my two sons. They were still in their baseball uniforms, and I remembered they’d had a game before Andy was scheduled to speak.
    “So who won?” I asked them. The automatic question. Andy would have approved.
    “Us,” said Peter, my older son, who was a head taller than I was. He had cried only once since he was a child, but he came running to his sister and me, and wept.
    In the west a bar of gold separated sky and land. Over Peter’s shoulder, I could see a grove of poplars. Already their leaves were turning, and the golden light caught them and warmed them to the colour of amber.
    I closed my eyes and there, in memory, was another day of golden light. My classics professor was standing at her desk while the September sun streamed in the window, and she told us about the myth of the Heliades. Phaeton, she said, shaking her head sadly, had tried to drive the chariot of the sun across heaven, and Zeus had struck him down and turned his sisters into poplar trees. As they wept for their dead brother, the tears of Phaeton’s sisters hardened into amber.
    As I closed my arms around my son, I knew that my heart had already turned to wood.

CHAPTER
    2
    At six o’clock the next morning I was walking across the Albert Street bridge, thinking about murder. The city was sullen with heat from the day before, and it was going to be another scorcher. Mist was burning off Wascana Lake, and through the haze I could see the bright sails of windsurfers defying the heat. Already the T-shirts of the joggers I met on the bridge were splotched with sweat, and I could feel the cotton sundress I’d grabbed from Mieka’s closet sticking wetly to my back.
    The heat was all around me, but it didn’t bother me. I was safe in the isolating numbness of aftershock. It was a feeling I was familiar with, and I hugged it to me. This was not my first experience with murder, and I wasn’t looking forward to what came after the numbness wore off.
    Three years earlier, in an act as senseless as it was brutal, two strangers had killed my husband, Ian. His death changed everything for me. The obvious blows – the loss of a husband and father – had left me dazed and reeling. But it was what Ian’s death implied about human existence that almost destroyed me.
    Until the December morning when I opened the door and Andy Boychuk was standing there, shivering, telling me there was painful news, I had believed that careful people, people like me, could count on the laws of cause and effect to keep us safe. The absence of motive in Ian’s murder, the metaphysical sneer that seemed to be the only explanation for his death, came close to defeating me.
    It had been a long climb back, and I thought I had won. I thought I had vanquished the dark forces that had paralyzed me after Ian’s murder, but as I stood on the bridge and looked at the sun glaring on the water and smelled the heat coming up from the pavement, I knew nothing was finished. I could feel the darkness rising again, and I was desperately afraid.
    The snow was deep the night Ian died. It was the end of December, the week between Christmas and New Year. We always get snow that week, and the day Ian died was the day of the worst blizzard of the winter.
    He had driven to the southwest corner of the province just after breakfast. He went because he had lost the toss of a coin. There were two funerals that day: one in the city for the wife of one of the government members and one in Swift Current for an old MLA who’d been elected in the forties. Two funerals, and the night before at a holiday party, Ian and Howard Dowhanuik had had a few drinks and tossed a coin. Ian lost.
    We quarrelled about his going. I called him, dripping from the shower, to make him listen to the weather forecast. He dismissed it with an expletive and disappeared into the bathroom. Fifteen minutes later, pale, hung over and angry, he got into the Volvo and drove to Swift Current. That was the last time I saw him