She lives with and loves Joan Richter, a night nurse in the ICU of the local hospital. They have had a joyous, concentric alliance for six years. They met when Magdalena treated Joan’s Great Dane, Daphne, for bloat. Magdalena couldn’t save her. The women became friends while Joan was grieving. Every time an animal died, Magdalena wept. Joan was attracted to the depth of her compassion. Joan sees constant death in her job and cannot afford to lose that much of herself.
When Joan moved to the farm, the two women decided to breed Great Danes. Great Danes suit Magdalena. They are dogs whose enormous strength and will are offset by their gentleness and generosity.
Joan, ten years younger, is small beside the great dogs. They could easily pull her over. But she brooks no nonsense. She is wiry and muscular with tawny skin and blond hair pulled back in a ponytail. In spite of the pressures of her job, the frequent dealing with death (or perhaps because of these), she is a beaming, enthusiastic woman, constantly on the move.
In the farm kitchen Joan is making muffins with cut-up peaches from their small orchard. She has already brewed a pot of coffee. She is just home from her shift. The evening before, a fifty-year-old farmer had come in, comatose from a stroke. He hadn’t made it through the night.
At the end of the lane, Magdalena bends down to a puddle to pick up the newspaper, thankfully wrapped in double plastic. She shakes it, clucking, splattering muddy water on herself and heads back to the farmhouse. She yells, “Hello, paper’s here,” and places it on the back stoop. The urge to rip it open and see what’s inside is pressing, but she is surrounded by five panting, expectant dogs. The news can wait. Their hunger cannot.
She walks to the barn and they follow, bounding through the stable door, swarming around her, tails waving like whips.
First, with a hose, she rinses out an aluminum tub and fills it with fresh water. The clean dishes are lined up on a bench and she orders the five adult dogs to sit. They do so, drooling, until she has measured out four cups of kibbles from a grain bin into each dish. (She will do this again in the evening.)
“Wait!” she commands. “Wait!” And the dogs’ drool reaches the floor. Then she says, “Okay,” and the great beasts lunge and gobble.
And to Brunhilde she says, “C’mon, Hildy, my girl, you get yours in the house.”
Magdalena climbs the back steps with the puppy and they enter the kitchen, an old-fashioned, high-ceilinged space with a wood stove and pale green cupboards with chipped paint and an oversized, stained enamel sink. The room is filled with the delicious odour of freshly baked muffins. She smiles at Joan and goes over to embrace her at the Formica table but something stops her. Joan’s face is grim. She angles her head toward the newspaper on the table. The headline reads, “Missing Girl’s Nude Body Found Near Industrial Canal.”
1
Three Days Earlier: A Monday Morning in July 1986
Melvyn Searle
The first thing he notices when he looks out the window of his second floor flat is the sky. Red. Glaring, voluptuous red. A crimson sun. “Red sky in the morning …” This may interfere with his plans. But the heavy rains will actually work in his favour.
Melvyn Searle’s flat is in a red brick house on a square of similar two-storey houses with broad verandahs, constructed just before the First World War. The square is leafy and the small front lawns, most of them with low fences, have well-tended gardens. In the centre of the square is a lovely little park called Schiller Park, because Germans were the early residents here. There is the ubiquitous wooden structure for children to play on.
Many children go there: younger ones in the morning with their mothers, but in the afternoons, when school is out, older children come, as well, and use the big set-up for their games. Sometimes even teenagers hang around. On Saturdays and Sundays, the park is filled.
Melvyn’s flat occupies the whole second floor. At the back, steep stairs lead to a driveway where he parks his grey Honda. It’s more space than he needs, as he is single, but he can afford it and he likes the area. And it’s only a short bus ride to the Courtice Museum, where he is head of the education department. He has an MA in ethnology. His specialty is masks. But he also earned a B.Ed. because he loves to work with children.
This morning he leaves his sparse bedroom with the dark furniture inherited from his parents and wanders in his striped pajama bottoms into his equally spare living room — except for the walls on which hang a great variety of masks. Besides those, the room contains only a couch and a chair. Above the couch are two inconsistencies: Arthur Rackham posters of Alice in Wonderland. On a side wall there is a shelving unit that holds a TV and a portable stereo on which he often plays children’s records. “Free to Be You and Me” is one of his favourites as are “The Frog Prince” and “Honey on Toast.”
The masks are impressive. He sometimes splurges on purchases, but his prized possession is a carved wooden Congolese kifwebe mask, whose intricately etched, angular shape gives it a Picasso-esque look. He also has a Chinese lion mask. And a glass mask from Poland. Most of his masks are copies he has made himself. An Indonesian Topeng Dalem mask. A Nigerian maiden spirit mask. A Hellenistic terra cotta mask. And several beautiful Japanese Noh masks, their simplicity, their apparent vacancy actually faces of restrained, secretive, exquisite revelation. Still others are his own creations, extensions of himself from a plaster mould of his own face. These are the masks he has used for his … what shall he call them? Escapades? Rituals? Rites? He wonders which ones he will choose for today.
His masks are an obsession. He loves their ironic duality: the wearer gives a mask life, but a mask also gives the wearer life, a wholly new life that sometimes comes deep from within and sometimes is external, something desired. A mask knows. A mask, though inanimate, has a subversive vitality. From the moment the wearer puts it on, a mask is born and finds its own voice. The mask overwhelms the wearer and the wearer injects that into mask. There is crucial intimacy between them. One cannot exist without the other. Without the wearer, a mask is simply a static aesthetic object. On him, he and the mask both come alive.
He leaves the masks for now, although still pondering his choices for today and goes into the kitchen. It is a former bedroom and is quite large, but has only one small counter with a sink, a narrow gas range, and a refrigerator that is covered with children’s drawings, gifts mostly from his Saturday-morning classes. There are also pictures of little girls from magazines and there is a newpaper photo of Lizbett Warne as “Annie.” A couple of Polaroids he took of his current mask class with Lizbett in them are up, as well. He also has a photo of her in one of the masks she has made, the star mask … as if she needed such an extension of her vivid self. The pictures of Lizbett give him a thrill every time he looks at them and imagines the time when they’ll be together. But today, as he opens the refrigerator to get himself some juice, he feels much more. He feels a frisson of apprehension, a flip in his gut, a stirring in his groin. This is the day.
He flicks on the radio. The war between Iran and Iraq is still raging. Iran is supporting the Kurdish guerillas fighting for autonomy in Iraq. A car bomb has killed thirty-two people in Beirut and wounded 140 others. The trade and budget deficits are worsening. The Chernobyl clean-up is an ongoing horror. President Botha has declared a state of emergency in South Africa where millions of blacks have been on strike to protest Apartheid.
Melvyn turns to a classical music station and gets a Mozart clarinet concerto. He switches it off. He is too keyed-up for music.
He is a pale, small man, very thin but with a disarming agility, a childlike looseness. His face is almost beautiful, with high, delineated cheekbones, a fine nose. His skin is smooth and taut. His limpid eyes, the colour of Wedgwood and defined by pale, thick lashes, are magnified by round tortoiseshell glasses that correct his far-sightedness. They give him a look of wide-eyed enthusiasm. And his hair is baby-soft and blond. No matter how he has it cut or what he puts on it, it is unruly, with cowlicks. His thin lips, when pulled back in a smile reveal small