Deadly Appearances Read Online Free Page A

alive.
    At the trial, they pieced together the last hours of my husband’s life. He had spoken well and movingly at the funeral, quoting Tennyson in his eulogy. (“I am a part of all that I have met … /How dull it is to pause, to make an end/To rust unburnished, not to shine in use.”) After the service, he went to the church basement and had coffee and sandwiches, talked to some supporters, kissed the widow, filled his Thermos and started for home. It was a little after four in the afternoon.
    It must have been the girl who made him stop. I saw her at the trial, of course: a dull-eyed seventeen-year-old with a stiff explosion of platinum hair and a mouth painted a pale, iridescent mauve. Her boyfriend was older, nineteen. He had shoulder-length blond hair and his eyes were goatish, pink-rimmed and vacant.
    They didn’t look like killers.
    The boy and the girl had separate lawyers, but they were alike: passionate, unsure young men who skipped over the death and asked us to address ourselves to the defendants’ state of mind on the night in question. The boy’s lawyer had a curious way of emphasizing the key word in each sentence, and I, who had written many speeches, knew that if I were to look at his notes I would see those words underlined.
    “He was frustrated,” the boy’s lawyer said, his voice squeaking with fervour. “His television had broken down. And then his car got a flat tire on the night of the blizzard . And he wanted to take his girlfriend to the party . When Ian Kilbourn stopped to offer assistance, my client was already agitated, and when Mr. Kilbourn refused to drive my client and his girlfriend to the party, my client’s frustration just boiled over . He had the wrench in his hand anyway, and before he knew it, it just happened. Frustration, pure and simple.”
    “Fourteen times,” the Crown prosecutor said, leaping to her feet. “The pathologist said there were fourteen blows. Mr. Kilbourn’s head was pulp. Here, look at the pictures.”
    When I saw the dark spillage of my husband’s head against the snow, the old, logical world shattered for me. It was months before I was able to put the pieces together again, and it was Andy who made me believe there was a foundation on which it would be safe to rebuild.
    One evening the September after my husband died, I was in my backyard cutting flowers, and I sensed someone behind me. It was Andy, and there was a look on his face that was hard to read in the half light. As always when he talked with friends, there was no preamble.
    “Jo, I’ve had a hell of a time dealing with what happened to Ian. I know it’s been a thousand times worse for you, but today something came back to me, and it’s helping. When I was in high school we read Heart of Darkness – I guess all the grade twelves read it that year. Anyway, the woman who taught us said that Kurtz possessed a mind that was sane but a soul that was mad. I think those kids who killed Ian must have been like that. Somehow that explains a lot. The world’s a rational place, Jo. Anyway,” he had said, “that’s all I came to say.”
    Much later, as I thought back to the words, they didn’t seem particularly profound, but on that September night I clung to them. In isolating my husband’s murderers as mutants, spiritual misfits, Andy had made it possible for me to reclaim the image of a world that made sense. But now the man who had touched my shoulder and turned me from the heart of darkness had been swallowed by the darkness himself.
    I turned onto the path that curved around Speaker’s Corner. “A mind that was sane, but a soul that was mad,” I said. A woman walking by with her basset hound looked at me curiously. I smiled at her. “Just saying my mantra.” She tightened her grip on the dog’s leash and quickened her steps. I didn’t blame her. If I could have managed it, I would have run from me, too.
    Considering what was waiting for me at the hospital, perhaps leaving