Deadly Appearances by Gail Bowen Read Free Book Online

extraordinary exception – northwest of the main road where it was clearly visible from the highway – where it was, in fact, the first thing anyone driving west from Regina saw – was the new chapel of Wolf River Bible College. It was an amazing structure for an institution that prided itself on cleaving to the traditional values. It looked like a high-tech child’s toy – a building made of giant Lego pieces or those intricate metal building sets kids used to play with thirty years ago.
    The central building was an octagon, and four lozenge-shaped wings angled off it in an X shape. Everything was there in plain sight: steel beams, trusses, ducts, huge concrete planks, transformers; and everything was painted in primary colours, red, yellow, blue. Only the cross, which soared from the centre of the octagon, was unpainted. In the sunlight it glinted with the soft glow of anodized metal. The chapel was a brazen and innovative building as out of place in the midst of the comfortable mediocrity of the campus as a Mies van der Rohe chair in the middle of a K-Mart. I wanted to get a closer look.
    The first thing I discovered was that the building had a name. A sign encased in Lucite pointed the way to the Charlie Appleby Prayer Centre. The construction was recent enough that the area around the chapel hadn’t been landscaped. Clumps of earth turned over by machines baked hot and hard in the sun. Someone had thrown down a makeshift path of concrete blocks; and when I looked in the direction of the chapel, I saw a man and a woman walking toward me. The man was pushing a wheelchair, and the woman had a stroller. When they got closer, I realized that I knew the young man. He was Craig and Julie Evanson’s son, Mark. Seeing him brought a rush of memories – memories of the time before the leadership race had divided us, and Craig and Julie and Ian and I had been young together.
    We had met seventeen years before – the year our party, to everyone’s surprise, formed the government. This was the election we weren’t supposed to win, and the months that followed were heady times – at least for the men.
    The wives saw a lot of one another that first term. It was a time of birthday parties and car pools and earnest discussions about preschools and free schools and French immersion. No one was more earnest than Julie Evanson. She and Craig had one child, Mark, the same age as our daughter, Mieka. He was the centre of Julie’s existence. She planned her days around him, and there wasn’t an hour in the day when Mark wasn’t being instructed or challenged or enriched by his mother. Once, at the deflated end of a birthday party, all the parents began talking about the unthinkable: the death of a child. Julie had been passionate: “Can you imagine if, after all the hours and hours you put in to make them into something really special, it was over just like that?” And she had snapped her fingers defiantly at the disease or the drunk driver or the act of fate that might end her boy’s promising life.
    Mark Evanson hadn’t died. He’d done something worse. He’d turned out to be ordinary. By the time he hit high school it was apparent, even to his mother, that Mark was average, perhaps even a little below average. Betrayed and baffled, Julie floundered for a while. Then, to everyone’s amazement, she, who had had only the most perfunctory interest in her husband’s professional life, threw herself headlong into advancing Craig’s career.
    It was, for her husband and son, as if a hurricane had suddenly changed direction. The lives of both men were thrown off course. Craig, who would have been content to be the Member from Regina–Little Flower for the rest of his life, suddenly found himself speaking at strawberry socials and annual meetings all over the province. Julie had decided her husband was going to be the next premier, and the first step was winning the party leadership.
    Julie’s son’s life had taken an even