Free Murder At The Mendel by Gail Bowen Page B

moment passed, and in seconds, we were all drinking champagne and exclaiming over the tree.
    Twenty minutes later, Taylor’s stocking hung with care and the last holiday embraces exchanged, the children and I were walking along the river bank toward the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. The church was packed, and we had to sit on a bench at the back. Beside us Mary, Joseph and a real baby sat waiting for their cue. I knew the girl playing Mary. She had borrowed our tape recorder at the beginning of school and gone out to the dump to do a project on all the reusable things people throw out. The local TV station had heard about it, and I’d seen her on the evening news, standing on a mountain of garbage, swatting at flies and telling us that time was running out for the environment. A real firebrand. At the front of the church a boy in a white surplice and Reeboks started to sing “Once in Royal David’s City” and Mary stood up, adjusted her baby, shook Joseph’s comforting arm off her shoulder and strode up the centre aisle. A Mary for our times.
    It was a good service. Hilda McCourt had been right about the beauty of Charpentier’s “Midnight Mass” for Christmas, and as we left St. John the Divine’s, I felt happy and at peace. The anxiety that had been gnawing at me since Nina told me about her plans to move to Saskatoon was gone. That night when, stockings filled and breakfast table set, I finally crawled into bed, I fell into an easy sleep.
    But not an untroubled one. Sometime in that night I dreamed a terrible dream. I was in Stuart Lachlan’s house, and Sally was there with me. There was a Christmas tree with candles, and Sally was lighting them, very carelesslythrusting a lighted taper in among the branches. I kept pleading with her to be careful, but she just laughed and said, “It’s not my problem.” With the terrible inevitability of a dream, the tree caught fire, and as I looked through the burning branches, I could see Nina’s face. My legs were leaden, but finally, blinded by smoke, I pushed through the fire to get to her. Then we were outside somewhere and I was holding Nina, but it was dark and I was frantic because I couldn’t see if she was all right. Finally, I put her down in the snow, crouched beside her and lit a match. But the face on the woman in the snow wasn’t Nina’s. It was Sally’s. Her clothes had burned away, and her wonderful blond hair was just a charred frizz around her face, but her open eyes were still bright with defiance. And that was a strange thing because I knew she was dead.

CHAPTER

5
    When I opened my eyes Christmas morning, the porcelain doll Sally had given me was on my nightstand looking back at me. I must have left it there when I’d gone to wash my hair after I got back from womanswork. That morning as I looked into the doll’s bright, unseeing eyes, it seemed as if my dream of fire and death had been carried over into the waking world, and I was uneasy. But after I’d showered and dressed, I felt better. It had, after all, been only a dream.
    When I went downstairs, the kids were sitting in the living room trying to be cool about the fact that there were presents under the tree and it was Christmas morning. As soon as he saw me, Angus called out the name on the first present, and in the usual amazingly short time, the room was filled with empty boxes and wrapping paper and ribbons and it was over for another year.
    Around noon, I called Sally’s studio. There was no answer, and I felt edgy. But when Nina called early in the afternoon to wish us happiness, she said Sally was sitting in their living room, and I stopped worrying. We ate around five. Peter’s girlfriend, Christy, had spent the day with us, andwhen we came in from cleaning up the kitchen, the boys were already taking down the tree.
    “Oh,” Christy said, “it seems so soon.”
    “We’re leaving after breakfast tomorrow. There won’t be anybody here to look at it,” Peter said, and