The Further Investigations of Joanne Kilbourn by Gail Bowen

there when I needed him, and this was his night.
    “Nothing,” I said. “Just a case of mistaken identity.”
    “Sure you’re okay?” he asked.
    “Yeah,” I said, “I’m sure.”
    “Fair enough,” he said. Then he turned to Jane O’Keefe. “So, are you having second thoughts about the Women’s Centre?”
    “Not a one,” she said. “And I’ve waded through crowds a lot loonier than that bunch out there.”
    Sylvie started to speak, but Jane cut her off. “My sister doesn’t agree with me on this issue. But my sister hasn’t had to try to salvage women who’ve been worked over by butchers. If you’d seen what I’d seen, Sylvie, you’d know I didn’t have a choice.”
    “No,” Hilda said, “you didn’t. For sixty-five years, I’ve known that an enlightened society can’t drive women into back alleys.”
    I was surprised. There were some subjects I never discussed with Hilda. The drinks came and, with them, another surprise. Hilda had never been forthcoming about her private life. She sipped her Glenfiddich and turned to Jane O’Keefe. “My sister died from a botched abortion,” she said. “By the time I’d convinced her to let me take her to the hospital, she was, to use your word, Jane, unsalvageable. It’s vital that women are never driven to that again.” Hilda’s eyes were bright with anger.
    On the other side of the bar, the piano player had started to sing “Miss Otis Regrets.” Jane reached over and touched Hilda’s hand. “Thanks,” she said. “There are times when I need a little affirmation.”
    Howard snorted. “Janey, you never needed affirmation. You always had bigger balls than any of us.”
    Jane looked at him, deadpan. “What a graceful compliment,” she said, and everybody laughed.
    Everybody, that is, except her sister. For as long as I’d known her Sylvie O’Keefe had been an outsider. As I watched her blue eyes sweep the table, I wondered, not for the first time, what that level gaze took in.
    She had always been unknowable and, for much of her life, enviable. She was rich, she was talented, and she was beautiful. She and Gary had been a golden couple. Physically, they were both so perfect, it had been a pleasure simply to watch them as they came into a room. In the days when we were all having babies, we joked about the glorious gene pool Sylvie and Gary’s child would draw from. But there was no baby, and as the months, then years, went by, Gary and Sylvie stopped being a golden couple. By the time Jess came, Gary and Sylvie had stopped being any sort of couple at all.
    Jess was a miracle, but he didn’t bring his parents together. Gary continued his headlong rush towards wherever he was going, and Sylvie became even more absorbed in her career. She was a gifted photographer, and her son soon became her favourite subject. Her luminous black and white photographs of him, by turns sensual and savage, were collected in a book, The Boy in the Lens’s Eye . The collection established Sylvie’s reputation in the places that counted. She was a success.
    As I watched her assessing the people drifting into the hotel bar, I wondered if the time would ever come when Sylvie O’Keefe and I would be friends. Somehow, it seemed unlikely, but one thing was certain: after twenty years, fate – or the vagaries of small-city living – had brought our lives to a point of convergence again.
    “Kismet,” I said.
    Sylvie turned reluctantly from the partygoers to me. “I don’t understand.”
    “Sorry,” I said, “just thinking out loud about how the kids’ discovering each other has brought our lives together.”
    “Actually, I’m glad we were brought together tonight,” she said. “I was going to call you about taking some pictures of Taylor. Have you ever watched her when she draws? She’s so focussed and so … I don’t know … tender. She has a great face.”
    “She looks like her mother,” I said.
    Sylvie looked at me quizzically.
    “You know