Free The Early Investigations of Joanne Kilbourn by Gail Bowen Page B

that he was close to cracking.
    There was no pattern at home, either. The boys didn’t go back to school till after Labour Day, and Mieka was to start university in Saskatoon in the middle of September, so our lives were ad hoc, listless, like the lives of people who are stuck in a strange city by an airline strike or bad weather.
    Part of the sense of strangeness could, I knew, be traced to the fact that on Tuesday, two days after the murder, the kids and I had moved into the granny flat. It was Peter’s idea – a way for us all to get away from the heat.
    Our house on Eastlake Avenue was built in 1911, and like all old houses it had dozens of cracks and crannies through which winter and summer air passed freely. Air conditioning would have been a waste there. But the granny flat was another matter.
    There was a sprawling double garage behind our house, and the previous owner had had a flat built over it for his mother. It was one large room with a kitchenette and a bathroom. She had allergies, so it was sealed tight as a tomb. With a flick of a switch you could have it cool enough to refrigerate a side of beef or hot enough to slow cook it.
    The granny flat had been the place where Ian worked on lectures for his human justice class, and on more than one lazy afternoon, a place where we made love. When he died, I moved in the books and notes for my dissertation. Now it was my office, but for me it was more than that. The granny flat was a place where I could mourn or sit staring into space without fear of worrying the children or of being seen to look like a fool.
    When Ian had had his office there, he’d panelled the walls in knotty pine and had bookshelves built along one wall. There was a desk, a good leather chair for the desk, a reclining chair for reading, a brown corduroy couch that made up into a hideaway bed, and that was it. The decorating was fifties
Argosy
magazine, but the room had a cottagey feeling I liked.
    The Christmas before Ian died I’d ordered a braided rag rug from Quebec as a surprise. It is a joyful splash of colour in that sombre room. The rug and a wall full of photographs Ian’s mother sent me after he was killed are the only changes I’ve made. The pictures are a chronicle of Ian and his brother, Jack, growing up. I don’t know what a grief counsellor would say about the hours I spend standing in front of the pictures, but it helps. There is something comforting about the neatand inevitable progression of those young lives: from babies who stare wide-eyed, then beam as they sit, then walk, to boys who hold dogs and play baseball and ride bikes, to young men, faces suddenly serious under strangely dated haircuts, who hold the arms of girls in billowy dresses, and graduate, and receive awards.
    I wonder now if Peter didn’t believe we all needed the healing power of those pictures when he suggested we carry our sleeping bags into the cool peace of the granny flat until Andy’s funeral. Whatever the reason, we moved. And in those still, hot evenings before the funeral, we turned up the air conditioner, ate ice cream from Bertolucci’s and worked hard at doing nothing. The boys watched baseball on the portable TV , and they brought the VCR over so they could watch movies when there wasn’t a game. Mieka and I read through a stack of old women’s magazines she’d bought at a garage sale.
    It seemed in that cool apartment we could, for a few hours, seal ourselves off from the hot world of pain and insanity that surrounded us. And it was in those rooms that I decided to write Andy Boychuk’s biography.
    It was a decision that almost cost me my life.
    It began on the morning of the Taber corn. At around seven o’clock, somebody started pounding on the door. When I opened it, Howard Dowhanuik was standing there. Over his shoulder, Santa style, was a gunny sack of corn.
    “Jesus, Jo, I thought you guys were all dead. I just about smashed down the front door of the house, and then I