Deadly Appearances by Gail Bowen Read Free Book Online Page A

stranger turn. He was confused at first by the sudden withdrawal of his mother’s attention and affection. Then Mark linked up with a group of kids from Wolf River Bible College. At sixteen, Mark was born again. At seventeen, he became a husband and, in short order, a father. I’d bumped into Mark and his baby at an outdoor crafts show earlier in the summer. At nineteen, Mark Evanson was a solid, good-looking young man with a solid, good-looking baby. When he said he was happy, I believed him.
    Craig and Julie were not happy. If he hadn’t loved Julie so completely, losing the leadership to Andy Boychuk would, I think, have been a relief for Craig. He could have accepted defeat gracefully and eased into the life he had wanted all along. Except he did love Julie. Passionately, uncritically, Craig Evanson loved his wife, and her pain at losing gnawed at him. Long after the votes were counted, Craig was haunted by the knowledge that he had failed his wife.
    Julie was haunted by demons of her own. Losing seemed to be like a slow poison seeping through her system. She was sullen with those of us who had worked on Andy’s campaign, and she was jubilant when, late in June, Andy had answered a question whimsically and had been forced to issue an apology. Before the six o’clock news was over, she was on the telephone. “Well, Jo, what do you think of your blue-eyed boy tonight?” she had asked.
    Now summer was almost over, the blue-eyed boy was dead, and Julie’s boy was standing in front of me, his face glowing with pleasure.
    “Mrs. Kilbourn, what are you doing here? I mean, God loves us all and everybody’s welcome at Wolf River, but what are you doing here?” Mark’s face was as open and without guilt as a newborn’s. He stood on the path, smiling, expectant, waiting for an answer.
    “I came down with Mrs. Boychuk – you remember, Andy Boychuk’s wife. They’re friends of your mum and dad’s. I guess you heard what happened to –”
    The smile vanished. Mark cut me off. “We heard, but we didn’t want C-A-R-E-Y here –” he spelled carefully, then rested his hand on the shoulder of the boy in the wheelchair “– to sense that anything was wrong, so we’ve been walking him all morning. He loves the new chapel – all the bright colours, I guess.”
    For the first time, I noticed the boy. I looked into his face. It was hard to imagine him responding to anything. He was dressed neatly, even whimsically, in shorts and a T-shirt that had a picture of Alfred E. Neuman from MAD magazine on the front and the words “What, Me Worry?” underneath. He would have been a handsome boy. His head was shaped like his father’s, and his hair was the same red-brown, but Carey’s head, too heavy for his slender neck, lolled to one side like a flower after a rainstorm. His features were regular but they were slack, and his mouth gaped. A little river of spit ran from his mouth to his chin. Mark reached down and dabbed at it with a Kleenex.
    I held Carey’s hand and smiled at him, but he didn’t respond. When I straightened, I found myself face to face with Lori Evanson. She had stepped out from behind her husband, and she was looking at me with wonder.
    “Mrs. Kilbourn, we saw you on television,” she said. “Such a terrible thing – an evil thing! You were very brave to save Mr. Spenser’s life.” Her voice was light and sweet, with a lilting singsong quality, like a child’s reciting something she’s learned by heart. Lori was holding a baby I knew was her own, but there was a quality about her, a sense that somehow she would never move much past adolescence.
    It wasn’t her body. Physically, she was mature and beautiful. She looked the way we all wanted to look when we were eighteen. She was wearing a sundress the colour of a cut peach, and her arms and face were golden with tan. Up close, she smelled of suntan lotion and baby powder. Her shoulder-length hair was dark blond and streaked from the sun. She was