25.

Dinner began with a cold potato soup that Tina kept insisting was not vichyssoise, which I said was fine because I was never sure if I was pronouncing the damn word correctly anyway, which caused Andrew to snort in laughter and me to giggle.

“It sounds like you two did more drinking than talking in the den,” Tina said, visibly annoyed.

Through the rest of the soup course, while Tina discussed her problem with damask drapes and grumbled about the terrible job her garden maintenance people were doing, Andrew and I avoided looking at each other lest we both break into giggles. Three glasses of vodka had reduced us to eight-year-olds at summer camp. It was delightful.

The main course was grilled lamb chops and thinly sliced baked potatoes served on a sauce that I must admit was as gourmet as I ever expect to eat. My compliments were sincere enough for Tina to call Goldie in from the kitchen to take some sort of culinary bow. “Goldie is from Guatemala,” Tina announced in a tone that suggested a Guatemalan maid was a notch or two higher in the Vancouver social strata than one from Mexico or, for all I knew, Kurdistan. Anyway, she was a shy, petite woman with coal black hair and eyes, and Andrew and I toasted her with the Châteauneuf-du-Pape that Tina had made a point of informing us cost eighty-five dollars a bottle, but it was worth it, wasn’t it? I agreed, and said if she cared to break the empty bottle I would be pleased to lick the pieces.

Dessert was a mango sorbet. It went well with the coffee and not so well with my head, which was bouncing between the appetite satisfaction of the meal and the rapid fading of the alcohol.

Something was bothering me, had been bothering me since before I sat down at the dinner table. It was a voice in my mind, and if voices can have colour, this one was as dark as Goldie’s hair but not nearly as attractive. I kept trying to listen to this voice, absorb what it was saying to me, but all I could hear was Tina discussing boxwood hedges and cracked flagstone.

“Josie.” It was Tina, reaching to grab my arm. “Where are you, anyway?”

I turned to stare at her, my eyes unfocused.

“You have forgotten,” Andrew said, “that the poor girl is still on Eastern Time, which means,” and he looked at his watch, “it’s well past eleven at night to her inner clock. She must be very tired.”

I looked at Tina and told her Andrew was right. I was very tired.

Within minutes I was in the guest room at the far wing of the house, a second-floor suite with the same view across the water to downtown Vancouver that I had enjoyed in the den. A quick tour of Tina’s toiletries, a turndown of the bed, and a kiss on the cheek were followed by blessed darkness and silence and the even more welcome blessing of the soft bed and the duvet and the gentle slowing down of the spinning room.

I WOKE UP AND I KNEW.

I knew what happened that night, the night Gabe waited for me on the blanket and died. I knew how and why he had died, and I knew what I had done and what I had not done to cause his death, the story like a picture, and the picture developing like the one the horny Buddhist photographer had shown me in his darkroom once, an image on paper beginning to form. I had been dreaming that I was in the darkroom alone, watching the image appear on the paper in the tray, an image of Gabe on the blanket. In my dream I began to cry, and I was crying when I awoke.

It was the purses. The identical Louis Vuitton look-what-I’ve-got-you-bitch purses.

The face of the clock next to the bed glowed 2:15.

Going back to sleep was out of the question. I needed to walk. I needed to think things through, to decide what to do and how to do it. I dressed, went downstairs, and opened the side door into the garden.

Tina had told me almost everything about her house, about the custom cabinetry made of Philippine mahogany, the special floor tiles imported from Mexico, and the solid brass door fixtures from a small foundry in England. She had never mentioned the security system.

Opening the door triggered a speaker somewhere in the house, pulsing a high-pitched tone. Lights in the garden and under the eaves of the house lit up, and while I stood waiting for my addled mind to explain what the hell was happening, the telephone rang.

I closed my eyes and the door, and waited for Tina to find me, deciding what I would say to her.

“JOSIE, YOU’RE NOT WELL.” Tina was following me through the house while I asked her to tell me where the goddamn computer was. “Maybe you have that post-traumatic stress thingy or something.”

“Thingy?” I stopped and looked at my sister, wrapped in her silk robe, her arms folded across her chest. Andrew had spoken to the security people, assured them that the house had not been invaded by cannibalistic Vikings or anything nearly as threatening, and cleverly gone back to bed. “I’ve solved my husband’s murder and you think I have a thingy?”

“Josie—”

“Show me your fucking computer!” I believe I have never shouted louder. I may have awakened Andrew. I probably woke up Seattle.

Tina threw her hands up and turned into a room off the hall that I had assumed was a washroom. It was a small office. The computer on the desk stared back at me blankly. “Thanks,” I said, sitting at the desk. “Now go back to bed, Tina. Because I’m not. I can’t. And give me your password. I have to look up a lot of things before dawn.”

IT WAS FIVE IN THE MORNING and the sky was as dark as it had been at midnight. My flight left at seven, putting me in Toronto at three-thirty and home on the beach strip in time for dinner. I did not plan on having dinner.

I had spent two hours on Tina’s computer, making my flight reservations and searching the Internet for information on many things and many people. Some details confirmed what I already knew. Some were dead ends. None contradicted what I believed had happened. Everything confirmed it. Now I was standing near Tina and Andrew’s front door, waiting for the lights of the cab I had called to take me to the airport.

Andrew was silent, sipping a coffee. Tina was agitated.

“For god’s sake, Josie,” she said, “tell me why you have to go now. Talk to me, talk to Andrew, we’ll listen. How can you be so sure?”

“Because I am.” It was all I could say, the only way I could respond.

“What are you going to do when you get back?”

“Make some telephone calls. A lot of telephone calls.” This was only half right.

“To whom?”

“To the people who helped kill Gabe. All of them.”

“Damn it, you can’t go making accusations …” We had been having this one-sided conversation since I emerged from her office and began packing my bag, which is when Andrew awoke again and made coffee, wearing a silk robe in a blue and purple paisley pattern. I knew Tina had bought him that robe. She didn’t have to tell me that. No man would choose a robe like that for himself. Now she turned to him. “Talk to her, Andrew,” she said. “Talk some sense into her.”

Andrew studied his coffee cup for a moment, then said, “Josie has always made a lot of sense to me,” which released a low squeal of exasperation from Tina. I was saved from witnessing Tina’s revenge by the sight of slowly approaching headlights.

“My cab’s here,” I said, and hugged first Tina, who refused to uncross her arms from her chest, then Andrew, who squeezed me tightly and advised me to take care of myself.

“Josie.” Tina reassumed the role of a caring older sister. “Promise me you’ll at least rely on Mel what’s-his-name.”

“Holiday. Blue eyes.”

“For god’s sake, don’t go playing games with some of the other people you’ve told me about, the Mafia guy, the woman who shot somebody in her hotel room, that dope dealer …”