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remembered that your dad had given the eulogy, Angus. People said it was terrific.”
    “I guess I’d like to hear that,” he said. “And Jill, if you have a tape of Dad’s funeral …” The sentence trailed off.When he spoke again, his voice was small and sad. “I’d kind of like to hear what people thought about my dad.”
    We went back to Jill’s office and got our coats. My son and I were silent as we walked to the parking lot. There didn’t seem to be much left to say.

CHAPTER
3
    Taylor wouldn’t let me throw out the pumpkin. When she saw me heading out to the alley with it Monday morning, she burst into tears. Normally she was easygoing, but the jack-o’-lantern meant a lot to her. I put it back on the picnic table. When I headed for the university the next day, I noticed that Jack’s eyeholes were beginning to pucker and his smile was drooping. Apparently, when it came to aging, pumpkins weren’t any luckier than humans.
    In the park, city workers were putting snow fences around the broad, sloping lawns of the art gallery. Above me, the last of the migrating geese formed themselves into ragged V’s and headed south. Winter was coming, and I climbed the stairs to the political science department buoyed by the energy that comes with the onset of a new season.
    My nerves jangled the minute I opened the door to my office. Like Miss Clavel in Taylor’s favourite book, I knew that something was not right. But, at first, it was hard to put my finger on what was wrong. My desk was as I had left it: clear except for a jar full of pencils, a notepad, and a folder of notes labelled “Populist Politics and the SaskatchewanElection of 1982.”
    It was never my favourite part of the course. At the top of the first page I had written “Why the Dowhanuik Government was Defeated.” There were three single-spaced pages of reasons, but the explanation I liked best was the one Ian gave a reporter on election night. All of the Regina candidates and campaign workers had met at the Romanian Club for the victory party. By the time the evening was over, we had lost fifty-seven of the sixty-four seats, the temperature in the hall had climbed past thirty degrees Celsius, and everybody was either drunk or trying to get there. When the reporter doing the TV remote asked my husband if he could isolate the reason for the government’s loss, Ian had looked at the man with amazement. “When you lose this badly,” he said, “it pretty much means that from the day the writ was dropped, everybody everywhere fucked up everything.”
    Even with the expletives deleted, it had been a memorable sound bite. I leafed through the notes in the folder. A few pages in, I found a newspaper clipping: it was a picture of the survivors of the ’82 election: Howard Dowhanuik, Ian, Craig Evanson, Andy Boychuk, Tess Malone, Gary Stephens, and Jane O’Keefe. The premier-elect, who considered himself the consummate cracker-barrel comic, had announced that he would call them the Seven Dwarfs.
    I never thought the joke was very funny, and I didn’t think what had happened to the picture on my desk was funny either. Someone had taken a felt pen and drawn X’s over the faces of my husband and Andy Boychuk. I could feel my muscles tighten. Reflexively, I took a deep breath. It was then that I noticed the smell in my office, musky and sweet: perfume, not mine.
    I went back out into the hall. It was empty. I walked down to the political science office. The departmental secretary was putting mail in our boxes. Rosalie Norman was a smalland prickly woman, grudging with students and contemptuous of faculty.
    “Did you let someone into my office this morning?” I asked.
    She clenched her jaw and took a step towards me. “Hardly,” she said. Then, certain the balance of power had been restored, she went back to her mail.
    “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to suggest you’d been careless. It’s just someone’s been in there, and I need to