The Eye of the Beholder Read online

  The bulletin boards in the terminal had been replaced by the video sort that they had in Central Station. I supposed that made sense, since this was a highly congested area most of the time. I watched the screens flip from an Alberta Health Services ad about STDs to a travel agency ad showing first a mountain trail and then a rodeo, and then an ad for The Works, which had just begun. The ads were starting around again and I shook my head to stop from watching them all again, mesmerized. I had to pay attention so that I didn’t get on the wrong train. Nowadays, one train went to Clareview Station, by way of the Commonwealth Stadium and the Exhibition grounds, while another cleaved off at the downtown Churchill Station, taking students to MacEwan and NAIT, and shoppers to Kingsway Mall. The last thing I wanted was to end up in Northeast Edmonton when I was supposed to be in front a class I’d read the riot act to on punctuality.

  I got on the right train and off at the right station, but I was almost late, anyhow. Diego Rivers had been hard at work at his mural in the time since I’d seen him before the weekend. Now all the pink lines were pounded onto the white area of the fresco, and some of the painting had been roughed in. I wasn’t sure, perhaps he had hired other painters or students to help him, but the outer elements of the mural were coloured in with a pale undercoat of what they would look like, on either side of the mural.

  Two or three disgruntled students pushed past me, muttering, jolting me out of my communing with art. I hurried off to my class, and made it with time enough to get in the zone.

  It was not as hard as I had thought to move into the world of discussing the plight of Indigenous peoples trying to maintain dignity and culture in a modern, colonizing worldview. Here in Canada, we were only now seriously considering the damage done and reparation that could be achieved. In Mexico, there were similar issues, but it was more difficult for an outsider like me to assess, since the only distinction a visitor could see was something overlaid like the Huichols’ traditional dress to distinguish Indigenous populations from colonially-rooted Mexicans.

  My students were eager to discuss Monkey Beach, and I gave myself a little internal pat on the back for having chosen a thought-provoking novel they could connect with and be dazzled by. There were no Indigenous students in my class, but there were three Asian students who expressed solidarity with the narrator feeling stigmatized for looking different in Canada. Since they seemed very shy, the fact that they had spoken up at all was a minor miracle, and I silently blessed the brilliance of Eden Robinson’s writing. In many ways, my class were reacting to this novel the way I had reacted to George Ryga’s The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, many years ago. This was the magic of the written word, to inspire readers at the same time as making them uncomfortable as hell. And that was exactly what I wanted my students to come away from my class with—the knowledge that literature is meant to provoke and deal with the awkward and unspoken issues of society around it, not just to entertain. If they caught onto that, and the ability to write a strong five paragraph essay, I would be happy.

  We had two more three-hour classes to deal with the intricacies of the novel, but I was delighted to watch students walking out still discussing things. I cleaned up the white board, organized my satchel, and set off for the LRT station. I had no need or desire to trudge up the stairs to the office I shared in the English department, since my office hours were Wednesday afternoons only.

  Rivers had been working as hard as I’d been. The whole mural was under-painted now, and I was able to see a pale version of his ultimate vision.

  I stood there, staring at what looked very familiar: a central large image with a series of smaller images surrounding it. I grabbed my phone and took photos of the mural, and sent them to Steve.

  The mural seemed to be organized along the same principles as that famous “little cuts” painting I had linked in my mind to the death of Kristin Perry. Milagro-shaped glasses, a cowboy boot, and a mitten were dotted around the outside of the mural, along with similar-sized icons representative of the tourist attractions in Edmonton: I could see the pyramids of the Muttart Conservatory up on the left, and the Science Centre below it. At the bottom left, the brown square was probably going to be Fort Edmonton.

  Along the right side of the mural was a swirling art gallery, a circle of tents representing festivals, I assumed, and a trail through the river valley with the new Walterdale bridge gleaming alongside it. I wasn’t certain what the centre of the mural was going to represent, but it seemed to be one or two large seated figures. Was this a paean to tourism? I thought I could see the Legislature in the background, though it might become the dome of one of the orthodox cathedrals in town.

  It would take more than a graduate course in Mexican sociology and anthropology to make me understand all the nuances that were possibly at work in this mural, or the political art I’d seen in Puerto Vallarta, or at the student show. However, if it was a simple symbol structure at work, there was nothing like an English major for winkling it out.

  Was it a huge coincidence that Rivers was creating a mural with an organizing principle based on a Kahlo painting that had also been an influence on a murder in Mexico a few months earlier? What sort of relationship had Kristin Perry had with the artist-in-residence? I was certain that Steve and Iain had all of the answers to these questions locked up in their notes and reports.

  What I wouldn’t give for a husband who talked in his sleep.

  I had timed things properly by sheer good fortune, and dinner was ready as Steve walked in the door that evening. He looked tired, and it occurred to me that maybe I didn’t want to hear what he held in his head, and kept out of our shared space.

  We spoke about the news, which was depressing, and some gossip about Myra McCorquodale’s cousin, whose daughter was in the battle rounds of some reality singing show on television.

  “Is that the way people have to start their careers in the arts now? By competing on reality TV? What about apprenticing, and studying, and singing in choirs, and playing in pub bands before being discovered? What about keeping those manuscripts that will never see the light of day in your filing cabinet and sending that one you believe in out over and over again until it finds the publisher who sees the potential? What about the artist who paints in the garret and does greeting cards to pay the heating bills until that first big commission or the breakout gallery showing?”

  “Now it’s a contest—you appear at the beginning rough at the edges, and if you have a dead parent who believed in you, all the better, and the coaches choose you, designating you worthy, but it’s the vox populi who decide and your career is at the whim of who is watching NBC and bothering to tweet out a vote.”

  “And what even happens to the winners?”

  “One of them won a Grammy, and a couple of those early winners on those other talent shows are churning out records. Sometimes it’s the runners up who have the stronger careers, too. Adam Lambert is singing with Queen now.”

  I shook my head. It was probably the academic in me longing for more recognition of study, refinement, and practice, but it might have had something to do with a program I’d seen about the crazy reality shows they ran in Japan where they broke into your house to shock you, and humiliated you on screen to the delight and entertainment of the television audience. To me, these reality contest shows were just a short step away from that sort of spectacle.

  “Anyhow, Myra’s cousin’s girl is hoping to stay in the contest long enough to get a car. The last five or six get a car.”

  “More power to her. And she has a career to fall back on, right?”

  “Sort of. She’s a music teacher for elementary school. With funding as it is, music classes could be the next thing to be cut.”

  I sighed. This world was just getting meaner and meaner about all the things that made us a civilization. Wasn’t it Churchill who had said that if they cut funding for the arts, what were they bothering to fight for?


  “Speaking of arts, I have some pictures for you.” I went to my satchel to get my phone, and showed Steve the snaps I had taken of Diego Rivers’ mural in the making.

  “These are really useful, Randy. Can I get you to keep taking shots throughout the process? I’ll get someone from the unit to go take some pictures, but they won’t be able to do it daily, and will look far too obviously official with all the freaking lenses they bring for their cameras.”

  “Remind me again about where this guy lands in terms of Kristin Perry’s world, if you can. I know he was in Mexico at the same time as us, he was helping organize the student shows in that house gallery we went to, and that he is last year’s artist-in-residence. Was Kristin actually in one of his classes, if that’s how it works?”

  Steve did that arch looking over his shoulder that people should actually do before gossiping in restaurants, but which just looked silly at our dining table.

  “I likely shouldn’t even be sharing this much, but seeing as how you were actually the one of us to spot the victim, I trust your insight. And besides, it has been three months and even Iain doesn’t want to talk about this case with me anymore. He keeps on saying ‘what happens in Mexico should stay in Mexico’ but you and I and Kristin Perry’s parents know that isn’t the case.”

  I nodded. That hadn’t even occurred to me. If I was curious and unable to let this go, what must that poor girl’s parents be going through?

  “We got the manifests of every plane out of Edmonton and Calgary direct to Puerto Vallarta for the seven days before Kristin’s death, and everything back to Edmonton for five days after, under the assumption that would cover most permutations of a week’s booking. Interestingly, few people book two or three week vacations that intersect with Reading Week. The snowbirds who are there for two or three months suffer through, but most vacationers know to avoid it.”

  “Sounds like a lot of names.”

  “You wouldn’t believe it. Apparently, at Christmas, the city really fills up but we were there during a high point, and it never felt crowded to me in the least.”

  “You’re right. And you would think that when those cruise ships came in it would burst the streets, but we never even had to wait for a table in a restaurant.”

  “So, anyhow, we matched all those names to addresses and backgrounds, and came up with about seventeen cross-matches to Kristin Perry. There were her friends who were there sharing a hotel suite with her; two of her cousins from Calgary, who didn’t know she was there too, if they’re to be believed; Diego Rivers and his wife, whom we met—Rivers apparently has a reputation for being something of a Lothario with the undergrads; Kristin’s former roommate from her first year at U of A, who apparently had no idea she was down there; Austin Stauffer—the fellow that gallery organizer mentioned as her possible boyfriend—and his wife, who were down at the same time, but staying in Bucerias; Ellen Chorley, an actress who did life modeling for drawing classes that Kristin attended, but says she didn’t see her down there; Kristin’s former Grade Two teacher and her husband, who are now devastated to know of her death; and five other students who were enrolled in classes with her: Anatomy, Art History, Literature of Greece and Rome, and Spanish 100.”

  “Wow, that is amazing work.”

  “Thank you. We don’t just eat doughnuts and set up speed traps.”

  I ignored Steve’s jab because he knew I didn’t have a clichéd vision of his work. My concept of policing wasn’t comprehensive, in that way that no one really understood the ins and outs of any of their friends’ or families’ occupations, but I did know that the Edmonton Police Service, and my husband in particular, were diligent, forward thinking, and thorough. Sometimes, though, when a murder happened so far away, even if all the players were from here, it took time to put all the pieces together. And that was assuming that all the players really were from here, and that the crime was motivated by a real desire to remove Kristin Perry from the world, rather than a random act of tidy violence on the part of a Mexican National or other unconnected tourist visiting Puerto Vallarta.

  I closed my eyes. It made me tired just to think of the possibilities. And then something Steve had said worked its way back to the front of my mind.

  “You say that Diego Rivers had affairs with undergrads?”

  Steve smiled.

  “I wondered when you would latch on to that. Yep. And yes, Kristin Perry had taken part in a workshop with Rivers during the fall term, and been part of his curated show in the student gallery. There was some hint that they had connected for a week or two before Christmas, but the girl I spoke to was hazy about the details. So, he’s on my watch list, for sure.”

  “And this Austin fellow, whom Briar Nettles was so adamant about defending—how did he connect with Kristin?”

  “Kristin was apparently his shoulder to cry on while he was going through a trial separation with his wife. He’s about fifteen years older than the rest of the cohort, and his wife is a nurse who is funding his midlife shift. Too many life model classes and late nights at the studio were getting to her, and they split up between first and second year. That is apparently when Austin and Kristin got together. She and he were inseparable during second year, and then he went back to his wife the beginning of third year. This trip to Mexico was purportedly a second honeymoon for them, and everything seems rosy. They were staying quite a ways away in Bucerias, which is in the neighbouring state of Nayarit, in a condo up the hill that a friend of hers owned, but as you know, nothing is that far away, and you can catch a cab or a bus to pretty well anywhere.”

  So Kristin had been in a town with an ex-beau and his wife, an art prof she’d had a fling with and his wife, two friends, a few classmates, and a model who might be harbouring a grudge if Kristin had drawn an unflattering portrait of her.

  “Two men you’ve had relationships with in one place,” said Steve. “That’s twice the number of suspects we usually need.”

  “Don’t underestimate the women, though. After all, the lay out of the body is the same as the painting by a woman, not a man.”

  Steve smiled.

  “Oh, I promise I will never underestimate a woman. Didn’t we put that in the vows?”

  I smiled at him and for a minute lost track of what we’d been talking about.

  “All right, then. I’ll take photos of the mural every day for you, and thanks for letting me in on what is going on with your case.”

  “If it were up to me, I’d bring you in on more of it. I see so many elements of symbolic messaging, the sort of thing we need a trained reader to be noticing for us. But you know the drill, and I really appreciate your understanding of the pressure I am under not to share more.”

  “When it comes right down to it, Steve, the less I have to think about that young woman bleeding out on that sandy beach, the better. I wonder what they did with the sand that was stained with her blood.”

  “The forensic team digs it up and transports it to the lab under hazardous waste conditions, and then it’s disposed of in the same manner.”

  “But is there a hole in the beach now?”

  “Apparently not. That bar of sand tends to move around with the tides, so it’s unlikely anyone would be able to pinpoint the spot where she was now.”

  I shivered with the thought of impermanence and that lonely beach.

  “Randy?”

  “Yes?”

  “Did you say there was dessert?”

  I came back to earth, to our dinner table in our condo in a blossoming spring Edmonton, and my loving husband.

  “Coming right up!”

  24

  Spring session went on, and every morning I took a picture of the mural and every afternoon, I took another. Rivers seemed to have lost his crew, or sent them away, because the detail work was being done by him, alone. My students handed in their Monkey Beach essays and started reading scen
es from Much Ado About Nothing, one of my favourite Shakespeare plays to teach.

  Steve and I were back on our art hunt, too. With the bookcases up along one wall, we decided to balance them with a large painting opposite, above the low credenza that held the television and Steve’s minimalist but excellent sound system. Two tall towers of DVDs stood to one side, and I could imagine a large landscape or a triptych balancing them. Steve was more of the mind to group several smaller works there, but whatever the choice, we had no paintings at the moment.

  Before we leapt at a single painting, Steve wanted us to wait for the Art Walk on Whyte, which had been bumped up a month this year due to a conflict with some city building and repair work that had to happen along Whyte Avenue. Artists had been annoyed by losing their close connection to the Works Festival, and I had read that some were feeling the pinch of not having enough inventory on hand to make the weekend of sitting at a windy stall worthwhile. Still, it would be worth walking up and down the avenue to see what might be on offer.

  My class didn’t meet on Fridays, and Steve managed to wrangle a swap of schedules in time to make hitting the Art Walk during its first hours a reality. I was all for walking over, but Steve pointed out that we might be carrying a large piece of art home with us, so we took his car to the lot on 83rd Avenue, where the polite young men in the booth taking your money and offering you a ticket always seemed to be pausing from a philosophical argument or discussion of political theory. It was as if Chekhov cast and populated that booth.

  The concept of the Art Walk was to allow artists who didn’t always get gallery shows to have access to a larger audience. They rented space for booths, which were sometimes covered tents with three walls, and sometimes, just a patio umbrella perched above a table holding boxes of prints. There was one block cut off to traffic, but the majority of booths shared pavement space with pedestrians all along Whyte Avenue, from 99th Street at the eastern end, to 106th Street, where it petered out. There were booths near the Fringe area of the gazebo on 83rd Avenue, too, but that wasn’t the prime area. It seemed there was something desirable about admiring and haggling over art on the sidewalk, with the rest of Edmonton pushing by you on their way to a secondhand bookstore or gastropub.