I started to leave. "Suit yourself," I said. "I'm too old for this c.r.a.p."

She reached out and touched my sleeve. "I don't remember you as being profane, Joanne. But I guess I can't blame you for being anxious about what Maureen might have said to me before she died."

"Julie, please."

"All right. It was a brief encounter. I was on my way to your office to see if you'd buy some tickets to the fashion show. I was just pa.s.sing the bookstore in the Arts Building when Maureen Gault got off the elevator. I recognized her, and went up and introduced myself." Julie dimpled. "I said I was a friend of yours. You're not the only one who can stretch the truth, Joanne.

"Anyway, Maureen said, 'When you see her, tell her I'm looking for her.' Of course, I asked why, and Maureen said, 'I want to ask her if she's feeling different about any of the Seven Dwarfs these days.' "

I remembered the crude X's someone had drawn over the faces of Andy Boychuk and my husband the day Julie ran into Maureen. There didn't seem to be much doubt anymore about who had wielded the felt pen. "Did she say anything more?" I asked.

"I forced her to say more," Julie said proudly. "I asked Maureen point-blank what she knew about the Seven Dwarfs. At first she seemed angry at the question, then she laughed and pointed to one of the displays in the bookstore window. They hadn't taken out the Hallowe'en decorations yet, and there was a skeleton propped up against a stack of biology books. Maureen jabbed at the window in front of it and said, 'There's your answer, blondie. I know where the Seven Dwarfs hid their skeleton.' "

Julie must have seen the fear in my eyes. "Just a figure of speech I'm sure, but in retrospect, it does seem chilling, doesn't it?" She looked at her watch. "Four o'clock, already. How the minutes fly when we're with friends."

She thrust the scarf she was holding into my hand. "Here, Joanne, you take this. All those colours. It's more the kind of thing you'd wear." She turned on her heel, and steered her way effortlessly through the other shoppers in accessories. I felt as if someone had run me over with a truck, but then Julie had always been the queen of the hit-and-run artists. The scarf she'd thrust at me was still in my hands. Julie was right. That brilliant swirl of colour was the kind of thing I liked. When it came to insights that could wound, Julie had a knack for being right. She also, much as I hated to admit it, had a knack for finding out the truth. As poisonous as she was, I had never known Julie to lie.

I put down the scarf. Christmas shopping was over for the day. I had to find out if Julie had stumbled onto some ugly truth about the Seven Dwarfs.

When I walked past the North Pole on my way out, I could hear the soft, anxious voices of the young mothers waiting with little girls in fussy velvet dresses and little boys in Christmas sweaters and new corduroy pants. "Don't forget to smile," the mothers said. "Don't forget to tell Santa what you want him to bring you. There's nothing to be afraid of ..."

Jenny Rybchuk had stood in a line like that with her son. Where was she now? When her father said, "Now, I got no more daughter," what had he meant? As I drove up Albert Street, I could feel the anxiety beginning to gnaw.

I didn't wait to take my coat off before I dialled Howard Dowhanuik's number in Toronto.

He was furious. "A skeleton! Don't you know better than to listen to Julie? Christ, Jo, after all these years ..."

"Howard, as awful as Julie is, I've never known her to lie."

"Maybe she's turned a corner since we knew her."

"I don't think it's that simple. Howard, Maureen Gault was murdered the day after Julie saw her. What if the skeleton Maureen was talking about wasn't figurative? What if she really did chance upon something about the Seven Dwarfs? Do you have any idea what she might have been talking about?"

"No, I don't, and to be frank I'm p.i.s.sed off that you think I would. Jo, I may lack finesse and I may be a little crude, but I'm an officer of the court. We take an oath. Do you think I could know about a stiff being stashed somewhere and say, 'Oh well, one of us was responsible for that murder, so I'll overlook it'?"

"I'm sorry," I said.

"You should be," he said. Then his voice was kinder. "That G.o.dd.a.m.n Julie makes us all crazy. Just forget it, Jo."

"I'll try," I said.

But I couldn't. I dialled Craig Evanson's number. When Manda answered, I hung up. After enduring the h.e.l.l of a bad marriage for twenty years, Craig had found a great wife and a great life. He didn't need to revisit his past. Besides, there was a chance Howard was right. It was possible that Julie was just making me crazy.

I went upstairs to change my clothes before dinner. I pulled on my blue jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt Mieka had bought years ago at a concert. The Go-Go's. Another blast from the past. When I reached down to pick up my sneakers, I saw the corner of the ballerina-covered box under the bed, and I felt the panic rising.

"Where are you, Jenny," I murmured. I picked up the telephone and dialled the number of my new friends in the cla.s.sified department. This time I wasn't fancy with the ad: 'URGENT: I must speak to Jenny Rybchuk or anyone knowing her whereabouts. Joanne Kilbourn.' I left both my office and my home numbers. I didn't want to take a chance on missing her.

The ad appeared in the late edition of Tuesday's paper. Wednesday morning as I pulled onto the parkway on my way to the university, I noticed the silver Audi behind me. When I turned into the university, the Audi stayed with me, but it sailed by when I drove into the parking lot in front of College West, and I forgot about it. Two hours later, as I started home, it was there again. The Audi's windows were tinted. Whoever was driving it had an advantage over me in our game of hide-and-seek. I looked for it when I stopped for groceries at the IGA, but it had disappeared. When I drove home, the Audi was behind me all the way, but it was nowhere in sight when I parked in front of our house. The first thing I saw at home was Taylor balanced on the railing on the front porch with a string of Christmas lights in her hand and a look of grim determination on her face. At that point, the Audi slipped to the back of my mind where it stayed the rest of the evening.

Peter called after supper to say he was coming home Sat.u.r.day to study for his mid-term exams. Taylor, who had been standing beside me, holding her kitten and listening to my half of the conversation with Peter, looked at me expectantly when I hung up. "Now is it time to get out the Christmas stuff?" she asked.

"It's time," I said. "Come on, we'll go downstairs and dig out the decorations. But you're going to have to keep that cat out of harm's way till we're done." I looked at the animal in Taylor's arms. It wasn't a ball of ginger fluff any more; it was starting to get a rangy adolescent look. "T," I said, "when are you going to decide on a name? You're supposed to do these things when the animal is young enough to learn."

She rubbed the spot under her cat's neck thoughtfully. "I keep changing my mind. Angus says I should call him 'Dallas' after the Dallas Cowboys. What do you think?"

"Dallas? It sounds okay to me."

Taylor shook her head. "I hate it." She moved the cat into his favourite carrying position, with his body against her chest and his head looking back over her shoulder. "Come on, kitten, let's go put you in our room." As she walked out the door, I caught the cat looking at me in a defiant teenager way, and I knew he would make me pay for banishing him.

Taylor and I spent the rest of the evening decorating. We were just winding fake holly around the staircase rail when the phone rang. It was Inspector Alex Kequahtooway.

"I thought I'd call and see how you're doing, Mrs. Kilbourn."

"I'm fine," I said. "How are you?"

"Fine," he said. "Mrs. Kilbourn, I was wondering what you were doing Friday night."

I felt my heart sink. "Friday night? I don't remember. Inspector, what's happened?"

He laughed. "Nothing's happened, Mrs. Kilbourn. It's not last Friday I'm interested in. It's this Friday. I was wondering if you wanted to go to the symphony with me. They've got some hot-shot guest violinist and he's doing a Beethoven sonata. That day in my office, you said you liked Beethoven."

"I do," I said.

"Well?" he asked.

"I'd love to," I said.

"Shall I pick you up at about seven?"

"Seven would be great," I said.

The next day as I drove to school thinking about what I'd wear on Friday night, I noticed the Audi again. I'm a cautious driver, but I tried a few tricky manoeuvres to see if I was imagining that the Audi was following me. It was right with me all the way to the university turnoff. When I got to my office, I called Alex Kequahtooway. He wasn't at headquarters, but I left a message, and when he called back a half-hour later, I told him about the Audi. He said he'd look into it. When I drove home after cla.s.s, the Audi was gone, and I thought it might be handy dating a cop.

Friday night, Inspector Alex Kequahtooway was on my doorstep at the dot of 7:00. I'd had my hair cut at a new place that cost three times as much as my old place, and I was wearing a black silk dress so chic that even Julie Evanson would have approved.

Alex Kequahtooway did too. "You look great," he said, as he held out my coat for me.

"You look pretty spiffy yourself," I said.

He smiled. "I guess if the compliments are over, we can go."

The kids came down to say goodbye, and we walked out to the curb where the taxi Alex had arrived in was waiting. It was a gorgeous night, warm for December, and starry. We had the idea at the same time. "Let's walk," we said in unison. Alex sent the cabbie on her way with a Christmas tip generous enough to make her smile. I ran back to the house, put on my heavy boots, and we started for the park. As we walked through the snowy streets, we didn't talk much, but it wasn't an awkward silence. When we rounded the corner by the Legislature, Alex climbed through the snow onto a little spit of land overlooking the lake. He held his hand out to me to follow. There was a full moon, and the ice on the lake seemed to glow.

"When I was a kid, we used to walk on the lake by the reserve all winter. Christmas Eve we'd walk across to church, then we'd come back, and all my aunties would make pies. That's what I remember about Christmas. Lying in bed, smelling pies baking, and hearing my aunties laugh." He turned to me. "What do you remember?"

"Nothing that good," I said. "Come on, let's walk across the lake."

"Are you sure? It's longer."

"I don't mind," I said. "I want to start this year's store of Christmas memories off with a bang."

We jumped off the sh.o.r.e and walked across the ice in the moonlight. Neither of us mentioned the case that had brought us together, and neither of us mentioned the Audi. We talked about good things: Christmases and hockey and ice-fishing, and I think we were both surprised when the lights from the Centre of the Arts loomed ahead of us.

We were late. The lobby was almost empty, and we slid into our seats, laughing and out of breath, just as the orchestra struck the opening chord of the Shostakovich Fifth. My heart was pounding from the walk, and the Shostakovich kept it pounding. At intermission, I said to Alex, "I've had enough excitement, let's just stay here."

He laughed. "That's exactly what I feel like doing. I'm wearing dress shoes, and my feet haven't hurt like this since I was a beat cop."

The audience drifted off, and I picked up the program. "Which sonata are they doing?"

He shrugged.

I looked at my program. "The Kreutzer," I said. "Wouldn't you know it."

"You don't like it?" he said.

"I love it. It's just that the Kreutzer Sonata was as close as my husband and I came to having a piece of music that was 'our song.' Tonight's the first time since Kevin Tarpley was killed that I haven't spent the whole evening thinking about Ian. You and I were having such a good time ..."

"We still are," he said. "If you want to remember, remember. Let the memories come." He leaned towards me. "You had a good marriage, didn't you?"

"Yes," I said, "I did. My friend, Jill, is a journalist, and she says, in her business, there's nothing like death to airbrush the past. I try to remember that when I think of Ian. He wasn't perfect. Neither was I. But there wasn't a day in our life together when Ian and I didn't know that being married was the best thing that had ever happened to either of us."

"Twenty years of a good marriage is about twenty years longer than most people get," Alex said.

"I know," I said, "but it still wasn't long enough for me."

He reached out, took my hand, and we settled back in our seats, holding hands till the audience came back, the lights dimmed, the musicians came onstage, and the guest violinist stepped forward and played, unaccompanied, the heart-stopping opening of the Sonata No. 9 in A Major. The piano replied, then, after a few bars of tentative approaches, piano and violin began their tempestuous pursuit of one another in the presto, and I closed my eyes and remembered the first time I'd heard the Kreutzer Sonata. Ian and I were at the University of Toronto. It was January. We'd been dating for a couple of weeks, and I was sitting in a cla.s.sroom on the second floor of Victoria College waiting for my English cla.s.s to begin. Suddenly, Ian was there. He wasn't wearing his jacket, and he looked half-frozen. Without a word, he grabbed my hand and led me down Vic's worn marble stairs and outside, through the snow, to a little record store around the corner on Bloor. There was a listening booth at the back. We went in. Ian's coat and books were on the floor where he'd left them, and the LP of the Kreutzer Sonata was on the turntable. Ian turned on the record player, I heard the violin's luminous entry, and my life changed for ever. We took the record back to Ian's room, and that afternoon we made love for the first time. Afterwards, as we lay in the tangle of sheets, listening to the violin and piano play their separate and confident variations on the single beautiful theme of the second movement, I knew that, whatever else happened in my life, I would have known what it was like to be happy. Four months later, Ian and I were married.

Onstage in the Centre of the Arts, the piano and violin were moving from the tarantelle to the sensuous pa.s.sage before the finale. Alex Kequahtooway looked closely at me, reached into his pocket, and gave me his handkerchief. I leaned forward to listen to the final dazzling burst of virtuosity, and the movement was over. The musicians bowed to the audience, the applause swelled, and I mopped my eyes and blew my nose. When I was through, I turned to Alex. "Not many men carry a real handkerchief anymore."

He smiled. "My mother always made me carry two hankies. 'One for show. One for blow.' "

"I may need both of them," I said.

"It's a powerful piece of music," he said.

"There's a Tolstoy story where a character says the Kreutzer Sonata should never be played in a room where women are wearing low-necked dresses."

Alex Kequahtooway raised an eyebrow. "Tolstoy may have had a point there."

We walked home through the park. The temperature had risen, and the snow on the trees looked heavy and wet. Suspended from the wrought-iron lampposts along the path were globes of light that reflected red and green and white on the slick pavements.

"Do you think we'll have a green Christmas?" I said.

He shuddered. "I hope not. I can remember only one green Christmas, but it was awful. No snow for tobogganing, and the ice was too thin for skating."

A car speeded by, splashing water on us.

"Never a cop around when you need one," Alex said mildly.

I laughed. "I wouldn't say that. You were there when I needed someone to take care of that Audi. Incidentally, it seems to have decided to play hide-and-seek with somebody else. I didn't see it at all today."

"Good."

"I probably overreacted," I said. "But there's been so much weirdness in my life lately."

I could see his body tense. "Such as?"

"Such as an old friend a no, not a friend, an acquaintance a telling me something disturbing."

Alex turned to me. "What did you hear?"

The decision to tell him didn't take long. I was sick of secrets. "I guess I should tell you who the acquaintance was first. It's a woman named Julie Evanson."

"Craig Evanson's first wife," he said.

I looked at him questioningly.

He shrugged. "Mouse work," he said.

"Right," I said. "You must know more about the Seven Dwarfs than we know about each other."

"Probably," he said.

"Then you know that Julie Evanson will never be anyone's candidate for humanitarian of the year," I said.

He smiled. "That seems to be the consensus."

"Nonetheless," I said, "Julie's no liar."

As I told Alex about Julie's encounter with Maureen Gault, we didn't break our stride, but when I repeated Maureen's line about knowing where the Seven Dwarfs had hidden their skeleton, Alex stopped abruptly. In the street light, I saw that his expression was all cop. "Did she elaborate?"

"No, that's not her style. Julie's the surgical-strike-and-withdraw type. She's happy just to leave you standing there bleeding. But that's not the point. The point is I think Julie really believes she knows something. Look, Alex, tell me if I'm getting into an area you can't talk about, but when you were investigating all of us, did you find anything really questionable?"

In the light his face was unreadable. "Was there something to find?"

"I don't know," I said.

"This case isn't over, Joanne. There are things I can't talk about with you." He took both my hands in his and turned me towards the light so he could see my face. "Do you understand?" he asked. "There are things you're better off not knowing."

I felt a chill. When I shivered, Alex Kequahtooway put his arm around my shoulder. We walked home that way, not talking but close. When we turned the corner onto my street, I pointed at my house. "Look," I said, "we're the only house without Christmas lights. I guess I'd better get out my ladder tomorrow."

"Do you need somebody to hold it steady?"

"Are you volunteering?"

"I guess I am."

"You're on," I said. "Is 9:00 tomorrow morning too early? My son's coming home from university around lunchtime. He puts up the lights every year; it would be great if they were blazing when he pulled in."