The Nesting Dolls (34 page)

“You don’t know a damn thing about what matters to Theo,” Myra hissed. Then she slapped my cheek in a movement as vicious as it was sudden. “Get out,” she said.

My face was stinging, but I stood my ground. When people behave badly, they want the encounter to end quickly, and I wasn’t about to cede that advantage to Myra Brokaw. The quarrel with her was too significant to lose. My voice was surprisingly even. “Myra, you can’t continue to care for Theo alone,” I said. “It’s hurting you both. You need respite, and he needs professional help.”

Her tone was withering. “And where exactly do you think I could find a caregiver with the stomach to clean up the kind of messes that Theo makes?”

Nadine spoke for the first time. “Competent professionals know how to clean up a man who soils himself. That’s part of their job, Ms. Brokaw. If your biggest problem is your husband’s hygiene, you’re blessed.”

Myra’s eyes were icy. “There are other ways in which a man can soil himself, Ms. Perrault. The night of the blizzard I walked into this room and found my husband having sex with your lover. At one point, she had been his all-too-willing partner.”

Nadine’s intake of breath was audible. “You knew,” she said.

Myra’s voice was thick with rage. “I’ve been spared nothing. After Theo’s accident, I found their e-mails to one another. They were sickening. Theo and that woman believed their relationship was a fair exchange. She wanted a brilliant child and she got one; Theo wanted his youth, and for a few weeks he recaptured it. As it turns out, they paid in hard coin for their choices.” Myra’s smile was a rictus. “Apparently, when your lover found out the truth about her relationship with Theo, she came here to confront him. I was at the Medical Centre being treated for an injury.”

“The wrist you sprained when you slipped on the ice,” I said.

Myra corrected me. “The wrist Theo sprained when I kept him from going back to the Wainbergs’ party to see ‘his clever girl.’ My point is that I left Theo alone, and that was a mistake. The scene I walked in on when I returned was stomach-turning. My husband was clutching his new clever girl around the neck, uttering endearments. From the angle of her head, I was certain she was already dead.”

Beside me Nadine recoiled as if she’d been punched. Myra was oblivious. “I waited until Theo ejaculated because I knew that would calm him. Incidentally, he doesn’t know your lover died. He thought she was simply distressed.”

“You didn’t tell him,” I said.

“I try not to upset him.”

Nadine stifled a sob, and I pressed on. “If Abby Michaels died here, how did her body end up in her car?”

“Theo has a wife who loves him,” Myra said. “And a loving wife has a price beyond rubies.” Her attention shifted to Nadine. “That’s something you’ll never understand, clever girl. A loving wife will perform actions that a ‘competent professional’ would never consider. After I’d cleaned Theo, I searched
Abby Michaels’s purse and found her Ontario driver’s licence and a receipt from a local gas station. I went downstairs, checked our parking lot, and saw a car with Ontario plates. The keys in Abby Michaels’s purse fit the lock.”

“You put Abby’s body in her car and drove it to the parking lot,” I said.

Myra’s eyes met mine. “The pain in my wrist was excruciating, but we do what we must do, and Theo certainly wasn’t capable of handling the situation. Despite my injured wrist, I dragged the body to Abby Michaels’s car. I drove until I found an appropriately remote parking lot, pulled in, shut the car door, and walked home. Ten blocks, through a blizzard. Again, Ms. Perrault, not something your ‘competent professional’ would do.”

“You left Abby alone,” Nadine said bleakly. Her face crumpled at the image. This time, she made no attempt to control her weeping. The sound drew Theo out of his bedroom. As always, he was immaculately dressed. He went to Nadine and reached out to her as if to comfort her. She stared at him in disbelief, and then she began to scream. Theo looked blankly at his wife. “Did I make this one cry, too?” he asked.

“Don’t give her a second thought, darling. She’s just a whore, like all the others.” Myra took her husband’s arm. “Come sit by the window where you can enjoy the skaters,” she said silkily. “In a little while, I’ll bring your tea and some of those biscuits you like.” She turned to us. “Get out,” she said and slammed the door.

Nadine’s eyes were wide with horror. “How can she do this?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. I took the cell from my bag and called 911. After I’d described the situation to the police, I called Zack and told him that Theo Brokaw was about to be arrested for murder and he’d need a lawyer. I explained that Myra would be charged as an accomplice and she would
need a lawyer too. As I knew he would, Zack said he’d be right there. When I rang off, I dropped the cell back in my bag, and Nadine and I walked out into the corridor to watch the twinkling lights on the ficus, listen to the piano, and wait. At one point, Louise Hunter opened her door a crack and saw us. “Is there anything I can do to help?” she asked.

Pain ravaged Nadine’s delicate features. “Keep playing Bach,” she said.

Louise’s music was the only sound we heard as we waited for the police. The Brokaw apartment was silent. At one point, Nadine’s eyes travelled to the Brokaws’ door. “What do you think Myra’s doing in there?” she asked.

“There’s no way she can prepare Theo for what’s to come,” I said. “I imagine she’s just making him comfortable.”

“Being a good wife,” Nadine said. She shook her head sadly. “Myra had the quotation wrong, you know. It isn’t a wife whose price is beyond rubies. It’s a virtuous woman.”

After the police arrived, everything happened quickly. Nadine and I were escorted back into the Brokaws’ apartment in time to witness what, under other circumstances, would have been a poignant scene. Uniformed officers separated Myra and Theo, so they could be interviewed. Theo appeared dazed and frightened, and as he passed her, Myra took one of the martini glasses of candy from the counter and shook some jellybeans into his hand. Theo gobbled them and gave her a winningly boyish smile.

A male officer stayed with Nadine in the corridor and Debbie Haczkewicz ushered me into Myra’s sitting room. I sat on the cranberry-coloured reading chair. Debbie’s eyes met mine. “I am so relieved that this is over,” she said.

As I answered Debbie’s questions I faced the photographs Myra Brokaw had taken to create the self-portrait of the aging fragmented woman she believed herself to be. I remembered
the sympathy I’d felt for her as she’d talked about the “little death” she’d experienced in leaving everything of her old life behind in Ottawa. Then I remembered her cold disposal of the woman Theo had raped and murdered, and averted my eyes.

Zack came. He’d brought another lawyer with him, a man named Tyler Maltman. I recognized him, as we’d been seated across the table from one another at a fund-raising dinner a few weeks before. I remembered Zack had told me that, of all the smart young defence lawyers in town, Tyler Maltman’s name was the one most frequently written on the walls of the cells. According to Zack, a positive jail-house rating was the equivalent of a starred consumer report. As I watched Tyler stride into the room where Myra was being held, I knew he had his work cut out for him.

After Zack embraced me and assured himself that Nadine and I were both all right, he told me that, given the complexity of this case, he might be a while. His excitement was palpable. He wheeled his chair with real vigour towards the room where his new client was waiting. For him, the good times were back.

Nadine and I left together. When we stepped outside, Nadine’s eyes swept the pedestrian mall. People were shopping and skating, and the man who looked like a sumo wrestler was ringing his bell for donations. “Ordinary life,” Nadine said. “All this was going on when we were in there with Myra. How can that be?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “All I know is that you and I have to become part of ordinary life again, and the sooner the better. How would you feel about going back to my place and taking our dogs for a run?”

Nadine’s smile was faint. “You’re the driver.”

Except for Willie and Pantera, the house was deserted. There was a note from Taylor on the kitchen table reminding me
that it was our turn to feed the feral cats, and Declan had volunteered to help out because she knew I’d been delayed. I called and told our daughter that all was well and that Declan was on my hero list.

There’d been many times in my life when I’d found physical activity to be the perfect antidote for overheated emotions. That day as Nadine, warm in one of Taylor’s jackets and a pair of her snow pants, ran beside me along the levee, I knew that while the horror of the last few weeks would never leave her, Nadine had not been broken by it.

Later, sitting at the kitchen table waiting for the milk to heat for cocoa, Nadine leaned back in her chair. Our run had drained the tension from her body, and she was ready to talk. “I was aware of Theo Brokaw,” she said. “Not that he was the one; just that Abby and he were acquainted. When she was finishing her dissertation, Abby needed a summer without distractions, and she rented a cottage at Stony Lake. Theo Brokaw was her neighbour. He was working on a book, and he, too, required solitude.”

“Myra wasn’t there?”

“Abby never mentioned her, but she did speak highly of Theo. She said he’d read her dissertation and asked all the right questions.”

“A mentor,” I said. “Someone she could trust.”

“What’s going to happen to him?” Nadine asked.

“Zack should be home in a while, he can give you a general idea, but Theo’s his client, now, so … ”

“I understand.” Nadine stood. “Joanne, is there a church near here where I could go to mass tonight? One within walking distance?”

“Holy Rosary,” I said. “But it’s a long walk.”

“I need a long walk,” she said. “My mind is crowded with thoughts that have no place in a church.”

When she was leaving for mass, Nadine started to put on
her pea jacket. “You’ll freeze in that,” I said. “Wear Taylor’s jacket and snow pants. I can drop your clothes off at the Chelton tomorrow morning.”

“Thank you,” Nadine said. “But please don’t bring the clothes to the hotel. I’d welcome an excuse to come back for a visit.”

When Zack came through the front door, he looked like himself again. “I think I could handle a martini,” he said.

“Nothing like a red-meat case to bring a guy back from the brink,” I said.

Zack grinned. “And this case is going to be a doozy.”

“What’s going to happen to Theo?”

“Well, the only way out, if the facts can be proved – and they will be proved – is to show that Theo had no capacity to form intent. There are differing intents for murder and manslaughter. I’m going to be straddling a fine line. I need to prove Theo had no capacity to form intent when he killed Abby, but that will be difficult if the Crown can prove that despite Theo’s brain damage, there were moments when he did remember his relationship with her.”

“And there were those moments,” I said. “There were also e-mails revealing the nature of his relationship with Abby. Myra found them.”

Zack tensed. “Do the e-mails still exist?”

“My guess is that Myra printed them out and filed them. She has an archivist’s zeal to preserve every scrap of information about her husband.”

“Even his e-mails to another woman? Boy, Myra really is something else. When I left to go to the police station with Theo, she advised me not to try to separate Theo’s interests from hers. She said that she and Theo cast a single shadow and that there was no way I could destroy her without destroying my client.”

“Consider yourself warned,” I said.

My husband shuddered. “Warned and spooked,” he said. “Myra makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up. Fortunately, while the Brokaws may cast a single shadow, the law makes it impossible for them to share a single defence. I’ll call Debbie and tell her about the e-mails, but between thee and me, I hope the cops don’t find them. If anything in those e-mails suggests Theo was capable of remembering his relationship with Abby, it’ll be tougher to prove his capacity was diminished when he put his hands around her neck.”

“What if he thought the woman who’d come to him was Delia? You saw how time shifts for him. He and Delia were lovers, and for Theo, twenty-seven years ago and yesterday appear to be pretty much the same thing.”

Zack raised his glass to me. “Glad you’re on my side, Jo. Jesus, what a mess, eh?”

“So what’s going to happen to Theo?”

Zack sighed. “He murdered a woman and then raped her, so he won’t be sentenced to a day at the beach. If we’re lucky and he’s found not criminally responsible because of mental disorder, he’ll be held in a suitable secure facility until a review panel finds him ‘recovered.’ ”

“Which will be never.”

“Barring a miracle – and I’m not counting on one – Theo will be in a closed medical facility for the rest of his life. The court will have to determine the appropriate place. My guess is he’ll end up in the regional psych centre in Saskatoon.

“Anyway, that’s the best-case scenario. At the moment, my job is to find a psychiatrist to show insanity or diminished capacity. How it plays with the jury depends on testimony about Theo’s conduct before and mostly after the fatal encounter with Abby. Of course, the Crown will be calling its own psychiatrist.”

“What about Myra?”

“She’ll be charged as accessory unless Tyler can cut a deal with the Crown on a lesser charge – something like obstructing justice or fabricating evidence. In any case, chances are high she’ll be convicted. She may even plead guilty in return for a lighter sentence.”

“And then what?”

“If Tyler gets the Crown to agree to a lesser charge, Myra will serve nominal time, then she’ll be let out on probation. She’ll have to perform a whack of community service, but she will walk among us.”

“Do you think Tyler will be able to get the Crown to agree to a lesser charge?”

Zack raised his eyebrows. “His chances would have been better if the police hadn’t found a loaded revolver when they searched the Brokaws’ condo. Myra said that the gun was her insurance policy in case Theo grew worse.”