Now I felt entirely adrift and for all I knew, Micheline could have been talking to me for quite some time before she finally tapped me on the shoulder. Startled, I turned toward her. She pointed to the phone.
“Kieran wants to talk to you.”
I got up and moved around her desk to reach for the receiver. I hoped whatever he had to say wasn’t terrifically private, because there was no sanctuary from Micheline’s eagle ears.
“Hello? Kieran?” The curt email from Steve was still stinging; my reaction to chastisement was always to close down. I could hear the bruised tone in my voice and hoped it didn’t translate as such across the fibre optic line. I didn’t need my boss thinking I sounded whiny.
“Hey Randy. I just thought I would check in with the two of you because I’m not going to make it downtown today for lunch. Rehearsals are a zoo, and I need to devote more time here at the moment.”
“Oh, no problem.”
“Was there anything you particularly needed to go over with me? Or are you feeling on track still? I take it you and Amanda have kept each other up to speed on things?”
“Pretty much, though I sort of need to know whether any of your actors will be available to my students, and when and how long I could expect them. Micheline says there is some sort of proviso in the contracts of several of them, but not all?”
“We only wrote it into four or five contracts, thinking it would be a particular specialty we’d tap for the campers. Let me get back to you on that. I know David has worked with the younger kids in past years and I am sure he’d be up for a soliloquy talk, or some such. Not totally sure about the others, but you are right, there is an expectation in a few of the contracts.”
“Well, that’s all I really had to talk about. I did want to show you my Shakespeare card game, but that can wait.” Micheline gave me a smiling thumbs-up, confirming for me that she was listening to every word and probably extrapolating the entire conversation.
“Well, good then. Keep on keeping on, and remember, we move down to the park in another two weeks. That’s when the fun really starts.”
I was about to answer, then realized he had hung up on me without a farewell. I replaced the receiver and moved back to my desk.
“It’s the murder that’s changed everything,” Micheline said, which to me was stating the bloody obvious but might have seemed profound to her.
“Guess so,” I agreed. “Oh well, gives us a chance to go shopping at lunch instead of meeting. Want to hit Winners?”
Lucky for me, Micheline had no more desire to hang out with me than I did to spend my off hours with her. She muttered some excuse about needing to pay some bills, and I grabbed my laptop and shoved it into my bag.
I was out on the street in front of the library before I had decided in which direction I was headed. All I knew was I needed to clear my head from Steve’s email and figure out my next move.
I had tried, for Denise’s sake, to get closer to Iain McCorquodale, but Myra wasn’t having any of that. I doubted I would be able to win over Jennifer Gladue, so Steve needn’t have been quite so explicit in his directives. There had to be some other way I could help Denise. Maybe what she needed was more support from the theatre community as a whole. After all, she was a generally likeable person. If more people knew she was in trouble, surely there would be a groundswell of support for her.
Who was I kidding? The long view was more likely that the community would far rather have unpleasantness pinned on a relative outsider, or at least outlier, so they could then pick themselves up and go back to pretending everything was rosy in their little world. Denise was a very convenient person on whom to hang everything unseemly.
I found myself walking along 104 Street, heading toward Grant MacEwan University, where I had worked when it was still Grant MacEwan College, having only recently shucked off its “Community” designation. Although they could now grant degrees in some choice areas, I was in agreement with Shakespeare and Gertrude Stein, and like the rose in question, MacEwan was still the second-string institution in town.
I loved its campuses, though, especially the downtown one with its striking postmodern take on spires and the bold clock face over the main doors. The classrooms were on the whole smaller than the U of A’s, and I’d enjoyed the group dynamics that had formed in the classes I’d taught there. On an impulse, I veered across the lawn to the doors nearest the campus bookstore and popped in to browse.
A bright assortment of insignia-emblazoned backpacks and binders was on display, ready to beckon the new students who would arrive in town shortly, or perhaps to attract the summer students who descended from all over the world to learn English while taking courses like calculus, the international language of numbers. I glanced over the small fiction section not tied to course selections and then poked about in the stationery section, coveting a few small booklets and a pen that looked like a red crayon.
“Randy?”
I looked up to see my friend Valerie Bock smiling at me from over the bank of animal-shaped paper clips. “What are you doing here? It’s been ages!”
“It has. How are you doing? It’s good to see you, Val.”
“Do you have time for coffee? It’s not overly busy in the cafeteria area this time of year. We could grab a seat and catch up.”
I agreed, and after lining up to fill cups from coffee dispensers and pay at the central till, we were soon sitting near a window and trying to fill in the blanks since we’d last seen each other.
Val still looked great. She ran half-marathons, had a black belt in karate, and fairly radiated good health. Her springy dark hair framed her face in short, whimsically behaved curls, and while there was just a touch of silver creeping in at her brow, it was a spectacular silver, shining like intentional jewellery and just adding to the fun.
Val was a full professor in the English department and had been very nice to me when I was maintaining several online courses for the college. She also had a family of three or four high-achieving kids and a doctor husband, so we hadn’t ever moved further than campus colleagues in the friendship spectrum. It was nice to see her now, though, especially as worried as I was feeling about Denise. Somehow, the tangible knowledge that there were other people I could connect with in this city besides Denise made me feel strong enough to be able to help her.
I filled Val in on my latest project with the Shakespeare festival, and she was kind enough not to sound condescending about what sounded more and more like being a glorified camp counsellor as I spoke.
“I love the idea of the Shakespeare cards! You could probably market those, don’t you think? I know my Connor could have used something like that last year in high school.”
“He’s not as into English as his mother?”
Val let out a hoot of laughter that drew the attention of two young men at the next table. “You could say that! I have no idea where the interests of my children came from. You would think at least one of them would consider medicine or English literature, but David is studying entomology, Susan is bound for Wall Street, and Connor’s back-up plan in case the NHL doesn’t draft him is to become a massage therapist and travel the world.” Valerie sipped her coffee thoughtfully. “I hope they aren’t really meant to be literary critics and are caught in the net of rebellion against parental authority. That would be sad, wouldn’t it?”
I laughed. “I can’t imagine your kids having all that much to rebel against, to be honest.”
Valerie wagged her finger at me. “Oh, you should never assume you know how people play out their home patterns from seeing their public displays. Isn’t that what literature really teaches us? That subtext and backstory is where everything really happens?”
She had a point, and I conceded it as gracefully as I could. A lull fell over the conversation; it would have been comfortable if we’d been colleagues, but as we were just visiting, it seemed to herald the end of the visit. Val and I stood at the same time and walked our detritus to the wall of specified disposal bins: glass, paper, compost, recyclable, trash. I was half surprised there wasn’t a radioactive waste label on one of them.
“I hear Denise Wolff may be in trouble,” Val tossed off as she discarded her Styrofoam cup, not looking me quite in the eye.
I was caught a bit off guard. I hadn’t known that Valerie and Denise even knew each other, but I suppose English literature is a small enough world that you’d be aware of faculty in the institution across the river from you. Perhaps they met at conferences. Maybe they’d been in the same undergrad classes, for all I knew.
“What did you hear?” I countered. It might be of use to know what the rumour mill was churning out.
“People are saying she killed Eleanor Durant because she caught her cheating with her boyfriend, that director.”
“Kieran Frayne.”
“That’s the one. You’re working there, what do you think?”
“Well, I may not be the best person to ask. When you’re right in the thick of things, it’s difficult to remain objective. However, I’ve known Denise a long time and I don’t believe for a moment that she had anything to do with Eleanor’s death.”
“But the police were questioning her, right?”
“The police have been questioning all of us, Valerie.”
I excused myself as quickly as I could, and while it had been nice to reconnect, it felt as if it had been a mistake to wander into Grant MacEwan. I didn’t want to break my tenuous connection to Valerie, as I liked her a lot, but it was going to be difficult to reconcile people’s natural curiosity and desire to gossip with my own worries about my best friend’s predicament. While I didn’t mind nosing about, asking questions of folks in the cast or the Drama department about their sense of what was up with Kieran and Eleanor, I somehow felt as if connections in Denise’s circles were off limits. Maybe it was because I just couldn’t face the thought of assuming for even one moment that she could be guilty.
Denise was my north star. Even though I could never hope to match her in terms of taste or willpower or vision, just knowing her and knowing that sort of strength existed somehow made me a better person and more capable of achieving my own small goals.
Denise could not be tarnished. And with that noble, if selfish, thought, I headed back down 107 Street toward the LRT. I had to get home and actually get to work on making all of this go away if I was going to get anything done.
Not to mention, I had to figure out at least three more activities to absorb and captivate teenagers for a fifteen-day stretch. I knew I had to over-prepare for that or they’d eat me alive. I had no delusions that I’d be dealing with “sweet gentles all” just because they were attending a Shakespeare camp. They were between the ages of fourteen and seventeen. I could just as likely have off-leash “dogs of war” on my hands. The only security I had was in over-preparing.
I wished Steve were not in Sweden.