They scanned my face and turned to Stan. He shrugged, before perking up a bit.
“Wait a minute,” he said, flinging open the door to the basement and thundering down the stairs. “I think I have something else that might do just as well.”
“Are you all right?” Edwina asked.
“Well, I’ll never look in another mirror again.”
“He’s just trying to cheer you up, dear.”
“Let’s chat in the living room,” said Donalda, steering me, as if I hadn’t been there a thousand times.
Edwina’s entire house is picture-perfect polished mahogany, pastel brocade, flowers in silver or crystal vases. In the living room, my father glanced up from the newspaper, peering over the top of his little half-moon reading glasses. He matched the decor. Eighty-year old gentleman, distinguished, white-haired and slim, seated in wingback with matching ottoman.
“Hello, um, Camilla,” he said.
“Can I get you a little drink?” Alexa asked me. Her colour was high and she had a sparkle I hadn’t seen about her for months.
Donalda looked at my father after Alexa left the room. “Do you think she has a fever, Daddy?”
“No idea, dear,” said my father, with a flicker of worry.
“Maybe she’s in love,” I said.
“Oh, Camilla.”
Dinner was wonderful. Edwina knows her way around a kitchen and I have to confess it’s very pleasant to sit on well-padded dining room chairs, surrounded by the warm glow of mahogany, eating good food off Minton china. She presided over the distribution of the roast lamb stuffed with spinach and chèvre with the air of an artist at a show of her work.
And, in my family, we always find things taste even better when we’re discussing people who are not present.
“She did?” said Donalda, as we heaped the lemon rice onto our plates “Well, I’m not surprised. Did you see what she had on?”
“No wonder he practically dived down the front of her blouse,” said Edwina, passing the squash soufflé.
“Exactly,” said Alexa, and reached for the broccoli, “and I know we’re all human, but I don’t think church is the place for it.”
My father just concentrated on the food. He doesn’t approve of gossip. I concentrated on my food too, since I didn’t know any of the people whose blouses were under discussion.
When the neighbours and other parish members had been dealt with, they turned their attention to the murder. I was waiting for it. Mitzi Brochu’s murder had captured the imagination of the magazine-reading public in a big way.
“A crucifixion,” said Alexa, shivering. “It’s too gruesome.”
“Well,” I said, “it wasn’t really a…”
“Somebody absolutely had it in for her,” said Donalda.
“No kidding,” I said.
“Not surprising when you think about the sorts of things she wrote about people,” Edwina pronounced. “She literally ruined careers and brought terrible embarrassment to people, right here even in our community. People who were just minding their own business and had nothing to do with her.
She just selected them and burned them.” I wasn’t sure how the words were getting out with Edwina’s lips pursed like that.
“I know,” sighed Alexa, twisting her napkin. “Poor Deb Goodhouse.”
“She is a little bit broad in the beam, but even so…”
Donalda didn’t get to finish her sentence.
“Her beam is not the issue. The woman is a well-respected politician and a wonderful contributor to the community. She’s given a lot of herself to environmental projects and to helping the third world and what does she get in Canada’s best-selling women’s magazine? Not a word about her achievements, just her backside. After I read that article, I cancelled my subscription.”
Well, I bet that showed them, Edwina, I thought.
“Poor, poor Deb.” Alexa was still milking the poor Deb theme.
I’d never given a moment’s thought to the Hon. Ms. Goodhouse before I read the article in Femme Fatale. Somehow she seemed to be important to my sisters.
“She some kind of a friend?” I asked.
The three of them turned and looked at me.
“Oh, Camilla,” said Alexa.
“Of course, she’s a friend,” said Donalda. “Don’t you remember? We all went to St. Jim’s together. She used to be at the house all the time.”
“So what was I then? Seven years old?”
“All the same. You must remember Deb.”
“Right,” I said, referring to woolly memories of a beefy brunette scattered among the long blondes, all of them giggling and smoking cigarettes and listening to Pat Boone in the upstairs bedrooms.
“You must remember how excited we all were when she won her first federal election.” Edwina gestured around the table to indicate that I was not only unaware, but also alone, in my lack of excitement.
The other girls nodded, as did my father and Stan. Joe smiled to himself, managing a hole-in-one on his internal golf course.
“I guess I missed it.”
“It was around the time of…” Edwina started to say Paul’s death but was silenced by the tensing of muscles around the table, signalling the topic was about to change. Every one in my family is always worried that any talk of Paul will plunge me into some internal chaos, from which I will never recover. I’m not so sure they’re wrong. We don’t get nearly as agitated over Alexa’s much more recent widowhood. The topic veered to the highlights of Deb Goodhouse’s career.
“So was she upset by these articles in Femme Fatale?” I asked.
A rustle of relief around the table confirmed the tricky topic of Paul had not caused me to plummet into instant depression. I guess I was as relieved as anyone else.
“Oh, yes,” said Alexa. “She was very hurt. They were terribly personal and insulting.”
“And even worse,” Edwina broke in, “she thought they trivialized everything she’d been working on. You know, these women politicians, it’s a pretty tough life for them, and then, to have the only article ever written about you in a national magazine focus on your backside, well….” Edwina became speechless at this point.
“Quite an effect,” I agreed.
“Not only that, but her blood pressure went practically through the roof,” said Alexa.
“Indeed?” I said. “She must have hated Mitzi.”
“God, yes,” said Alexa, avoiding my father’s flicker at her minor profanity, “Deb felt like killing her.”
Everyone made a point of letting me know this was just a figure of speech, only an emotion and not a reality, and Deb Goodhouse could never have crucified Mitzi Brochu, in case I had drawn that conclusion from Alexa’s remarks. Even Joe came back to earth during the brouhaha.
“Don’t worry about it, girls, I wasn’t about to call the police.”
“Well, of course not,” they said in unison, and changed the subject yet again.
“So,