Murder At The Mendel Read Online Free

looked at Sally. “I’ll bet she has had lovers,” I said. “And I’ll bet she’d need a bigger wall than you have to mount her memoirs of them all.”
    “Right,” Sally said, and she laughed. But then there was an awkward moment. I had told Hilda McCourt that Sally and I had a history. Like many histories, ours had been scarred by wounded pride and estrangement. Since I’d come to Saskatoon in July to teach at the university, Sally and I had moved carefully to establish a friendship. After thirty years of separation, it hadn’t been easy, and Sally hadn’t made it easier when she had suddenly left her husband and child for an affair with a student in Santa Fe.
    This was the first time we had been alone together since she’d come back from New Mexico, and she seemed tense, waiting, I guess, for my reaction. In my heart, I thought what she had done was wrong, but at forty-seven I didn’t rush to judgement with the old sureness any more. And I had learned the value of a friend. I turned to her and smiled.
    “Now, where’s this painting I can’t see without you?” I said.
    She looked relieved. “In Gallery II – right through that doorway.”
    The gallery was only yards away, but our progress was slow. People kept coming up to Sally, ostensibly to congratulate her, but really just to see her up close. She was as she always was with people, kind enough but absent. Not many of the clichés about artists were true of Sally, but one of them was: her work was the only reality for her.
    “So,” she said finally. “Here it is. On loan from the Art Institute of Chicago. What do you think?”
    It was a painting of three people at a round picnic table: two adolescent girls in bathing suits and a middle-aged man in an open-necked khaki shirt. The man was handsome in a world-weary Arthur Miller way, and he was wholly absorbed in his newspaper. The girls were wholly absorbed in him. As they looked at him, their faces were filled with pubescent longing.
    “Wow,” I said. “Izaak Levin and us. That last summer at the lake. The hours we spent in the boathouse writing those steamy stories about his lips pressing themselves against our waiting mouths and about how it would feel to have him –what was that phrase we loved – lower his tortured body onto ours. Even now, my hands get sweaty remembering it. All that unrequited lust.” I stepped closer to the painting. “It really is a wonderful painting, two young virgins looking for … What were we looking for, anyway?”
    “Someone to make us stop being virgins,” Sally said dryly. Then she shrugged. “And fame. Izaak was the toast of New York City in those days. Remember when he was a panelist on that TV show where they tried to guess people’s jobs?” Suddenly she smiled. “Izaak’s in Erotobiography, you know.”
    Amazingly, I felt a pang. It had been more than thirty years, but still, it had been Sally who won the prize. She’d been the one to live out the fantasy.
    “Come on,” she said. “I’ll show you which one’s his.” She grinned mischievously. “Actually, maybe you could get him to show you himself. He just walked in.”
    “You’re kidding,” I said, but she wasn’t. There he was across the room. Thinner, greyer, but still immensely appealing, still unmistakably the man I dreamed of through the sultry days and starry nights of that summer.
    He came right over to us. Sally beamed, pleased with herself.
    “Izaak, here’s an old admirer,” she said. “The other girl in the picture – Joanne Ellard, except now it’s Joanne Kilbourn.”
    Izaak Levin looked into my face. His expression was pleasant but bemused. It was apparent that the only memories he had of me were connected with a piece of art Sally had made. He gestured toward it. “I’ve enjoyed this picture many times over the years. It’s a pleasure to see that you’ve aged as gracefully as it has.”
    I could feel the blood rushing to my face. I stood there dumbly, looking