“Can’t you just use a zoom?”

  Ferrier winced. “Heavy. Clumsy. Too much glass.”

  “And you develop your own pictures?”

  “Oh, yeah. That’s the only way you get any control.”

  “Mr. Ferrier, it would greatly assist in our investigation if you were to allow me to look at your boat.”

  “Hey, wait a minute. You think somebody got beat up on our boat? Sorry, but that’s nuts, Detective. Nobody ever goes on it except us.”

  “Even when you’re away?”

  “Nope. We keep an eye on things for each other out there. If I tell Matt Morton or Frank Rowley I’m gonna be away, they’ll make sure nobody messes with the boat.”

  “But it’s not like a house—they’re not there all the time.”

  “True. But there’s all sorts of security out there. Has to be. They had a run of break-ins a few years back and now they have cameras.”

  “You’re certainly within your rights to expect a search warrant,” Delorme said, and stood up. “Mrs. Ferrier, thanks for your help.”

  “I don’t think André meant to say you couldn’t look at the boat, did you, dear?”

  “Well, no. Not really. I just think it’s a waste of time, that’s all.”

  “Even if we just rule it out as a crime scene, that’s useful,” Delorme said. “Our problem right now is that most of the boats are already out of the water. Where do you keep yours in winter?”

  “Four Mile Marine. Other side of the lake. They have a lot more room and they’re a lot less pricey.”

  “Is that off Island Road?”

  “Take Island. Make a right at Royal. Go about half a kilometre, you’ll see a sign. Can’t miss it. I’ll tell ‘em you’re coming.”

  Island Road was four miles out of town, north on Highway 63. Delorme had to drive past Madonna Road on the way. Following Trout Lake’s western edge, Madonna Road curved back along the highway after a few hundred yards. Cardinal’s house was a dark rectangle below brilliant clouds of coloured leaves. She wondered if his daughter was still there, or if she had gone back to New York.

  Work wasn’t the same without Cardinal around. Delorme liked to do all the footwork, cover all the bases and keep her supplementary reports up to the minute. Cardinal was all for narrowing the focus as soon as possible, and he was right almost every time. Then he would go back and cover all the bases, just like Delorme. “Working together,” Chouinard had said to them one time, “you two might add up to a decent investigator.”

  The two ident guys lived in their own world. Szelagy was such a chatterbox, it was practically like having a radio going all the time. McLeod was always making the world a present of his opinions—and his opinions were insufferable. At least once a day Delorme prayed he was only kidding with some sexist or racist or anti-civilian remark. She hadn’t realized how much Cardinal kept a lid on such things at the office until he was gone.

  She made the turn onto Island Road, wondering how Cardinal was coping. Never having had a husband, Delorme had never lost one, but she remembered how she had grieved when her mother died. A dozen years ago now. Delorme had been a student at Carleton University in Ottawa. But she still remembered how it hurt, day in and day out, for weeks and months. She hoped that Cardinal would soon begin to feel some respite.

  A daydream visited her. She saw herself having dinner with Cardinal at an expensive restaurant. In Montreal, for some reason. And then they were walking on Mount Royal, the city spread out below them. She was giving him a hug, just to comfort him, and then he was hugging her back, and her heart stirred with something more than friendship.

  “Jesus, Delorme,” she said aloud, and slammed on the brakes. She had missed the turn onto Royal Road. She backed up, provoking honks of protest from an oncoming Jeep, and wheeled onto the dirt road.

  Four Mile Marina: Sales, Service, Storage. The sign came up sooner than she expected, at the foot of a driveway wide enough to accommodate boats and trailers.

  A young man in cargo pants and elaborate running shoes showed her to the boathouse. The structure resembled an enormous shoe rack with rolling metal shutters for doors. It was two levels high, and Delorme was glad to learn that the Ferriers’ boat was stored on the lower level.

  “I better get back to the office,” the kid said. “Gimme a holler if you need anything.”

  “I will. Thank you.”

  The place was deserted. A light rain began to fall, rattling on corrugated tin, and intensifying the surrounding smells of pine and wet leaves. Delorme opened the padlock and pushed up the shutter. She found a light switch and flipped it on.

  The boat was up on its trailer, which made it seem enormous. The hull alone looked to be about six feet deep, all blinding white fibreglass. The upper cabin was crowned with aerials, lights and a satellite dish.

  Delorme stepped onto the trailer, and then onto the little chrome ladder attached to the stern. When she could see over the edge, she paused. Except for the wooden trim of the gunwales (if that was the right term), the entire deck of the boat was swathed in opaque plastic sheeting fastened with yellow cord looped through a border of grommets.

  Ten minutes, fifteen, went by while Delorme fiddled with knots. Eventually she managed to loosen the covering and pull it back far enough so she could climb into the boat.

  She stood and looked around at the wooden floors, the polished wooden trim. She climbed into the upper cabin and examined the wooden wheel, surrounded by brass fittings. Toward the stern, there were back-to-back seats in red tuck-and-roll upholstery. It was the boat in the photograph.

  She stepped back down to the deck and sat on the bottom step. This was where he had sat to take the picture.

  The girl, not more than ten or eleven at the time, had sat on the front-facing rear seat. Frank Rowley’s Cessna had been off to the right, the south. Delorme made a picture frame, film-director style, with her fingers and held it in front of her face. Yes, it was easy to picture the plane angled in the corner of the shot. Despite his care to remain anonymous, the photographer was so wrapped up in his pornographic project that he missed the identifying feature of the plane’s tail number.

  She had her crime scene—one of them, at least—and she was getting closer to her criminal. But it was his victim she most wanted to find.

  27

  DR. BELL CAME OUT of the downstairs bathroom drying his hands. There had been no need to scrub up, he wasn’t a surgeon, but it was a habit he had got into long ago, during his medical training. Whenever he was about to see a patient, he washed his hands. He kept the mildest soap possible for this purpose: Caswell-Massey glycerine soap, faintly scented with almonds.

  It was a ritual that helped him feel in control, and he needed it now, because lately his mind seemed somehow not entirely his own. Maintaining his equanimity was becoming harder and harder, and unwanted thoughts were intruding into his mind. These days he found himself clenching his hands, ready to batter some of his patients into submission.

  He called out Dorothy’s name, but then he recalled she was out for the afternoon, he couldn’t for the life of him remember where. Old age creeping up.

  He opened the door into the “public” part of his house. Melanie was seated in her usual spot, although not in her usual depressed posture. She was reading a Toronto Life she must have brought with her. Dr. Bell took the New Yorker.

  Melanie was so absorbed in the article, she didn’t even look up right away. Bell suspected she was in a comparatively good mood. An interest in the outside world was always a sign of abatement in depression.

  “Hello, Melanie,” he said.

  “Oh, hi.” She stuffed the magazine into her knapsack and followed him into the office.

  “Is it okay if I sit there for a change?” She pointed to a chair beside the couch.

  “Of course.”

  Melanie plunked herself down in the chair. “Just seeing that couch, I suddenly felt depressed, and I thought, why not sit somewhere else—somewhere you might sit if you weren’t depressed.”

  “I see.”

  “I mean, I get so tired of myself. So tired of my moaning and groaning. And I think part of it is I see myself as this pathetic person—a hopeless patient wailing on the shrink’s couch—and I thought, why don’t I just not do that for a change.”

  “A fresh perspective, so to speak.”

  “Exactly. Yeah. I feel good today. Better, anyway.”

  “So I see. Is that why you asked for this extra session?”

  “Uh-huh. I have something important to tell you, but first I just want to tell you the normal stuff.”

  “By all means. Bring me up to date, Melanie.”

  Brighter affect was evident in every aspect of her behaviour. Great actors understand the physiognomy of the emotions instinctively. Bell was an expert partly by instinct and partly by long study. Young Melanie was at this moment almost a cartoon of—happiness was not the word—but a mixture of relief and excitement. It was visible in the unaccustomed animation of her features: the twin commas of her eyebrows riding high above her glasses instead of in their usual furrowed V. It was there in the bigger gestures: the small hands flying away from her body, this way and that, as she described her week to him. It was there in the loose-limbed way she crossed one leg over the other, ankle on thigh, not her usual defensive clench. She bounced one knee up and down as she talked. He felt a surge of frustration and rigorously suppressed it.

  “I actually managed to read a whole novel in the past couple of days,” Melanie said. “You know, I was way behind in my English Lit survey, but I just suddenly got so into it. It was this E. M. Forster thing, and I just didn’t want it to end. I loved the characters, I loved his descriptions, and I loved not thinking about myself for a change.”

  “You turned your mind to things other than yourself.”

  “Exactly. And the amazing thing was that it was so easy.”

  She sat forward and swung her long hair to one side. Hair that had been freshly washed, Bell noted. The drowned-rat look was now a pentimento beneath the eager face before him.

  “The amazing thing about reading that book—which I had been putting off and putting off because I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to follow it and it would end up depressing me—the amazing thing is that it was easier reading it than not reading it. You know what I mean? I was in such a state about getting behind and about putting it off and waiting for just the right time to start and feeling so guilty and depressed. But once I started, it just went great.”

  “That’s good to hear,” Dr. Bell said. “Do you have any idea what accounts for the change?”

  “That’s the funny thing. Because what happened to me was something that should have upset the hell out of me, but it didn’t. I mean, it did, but not in a way that depressed me. I haven’t told anybody about this, and …”

  Bell waited.

  Melanie let out a deep breath, small shoulders dropping. “I haven’t told my mom. I haven’t told Rachel …”

  Rachel was her sometime best friend and current roommate. Melanie had already told Bell lots of things she had never divulged to Rachel, or to her mother for that matter, and she would tell him this too.

  “I saw The Bastard,” she said.

  “You did? You saw your stepfather?”

  “Former stepfather. I can’t call him that. I’ll just keep calling him The Bastard, which is what he is.”

  “Call him what you like. But I thought he had moved away.”

  “He did—not very far. To Sudbury.”

  “Where did you see him?”

  “At Algonquin Mall. He was coming out of the Radio Shack. I was just coming out of the Shoppers Drug Mart, and he was coming out of Radio Shack. I can’t believe he’s back in town.”

  “And yet you said it made you happier?”

  “Did I?” She looked at him blankly for a moment. “I guess I did.”

  “This was the man who molested you repeatedly. Used you as his sex toy for years and years. Can you think why it made you happy to see him?”

  “I expressed myself badly. It didn’t make me happy to see him. In fact, it felt like a kick in the belly at first. I literally almost doubled over. But then I followed him. He didn’t look at me. And maybe he wouldn’t have even recognized me if he had. But I followed him out into the parking lot. And I watched him get into his car. There was no one else in it. I wrote down his licence plate number.”

  “Why did you do that?”

  One of the hands stopped its fluttering. “I don’t know. I didn’t think about it. I just did it. I took out my pen and wrote it down on my hand. Isn’t that weird?”

  “You think it’s weird?”

  “Well, not weird maybe. But it was just completely instinctive. And my heart was hammering away the whole time.” She thumped her small fist up and down on her sternum. “Boom. Boom. Boom. I could actually hear it. And when he drove out of the parking lot, I followed him. Isn’t that wild?”

  “Go on.”

  “I followed him home. He’s living in this completely suburban-looking brick house. Big garage and all. I watched him park in the driveway. I just stopped a little way back on the road and pretended to, like, look around, as if I was trying to find an address or a street or something, but I saw him go into the house. So I know where he lives now. At first I was gonna call Mom and tell her all about it, but then I decided against it. It would just upset her too much. She can’t bear to hear his name as it is.

  “So I didn’t call Mom, I just went straight back to the rooming house and put on the new Radiohead CD. I just sat on the end of my bed and listened to it right through from beginning to end.”

  “What were you thinking while you did that?”

  “Nothing. I don’t think I was thinking anything whatsoever.”

  “How were you feeling?”

  “Good. Better, anyway. Like—I don’t know—as if this huge rubber band that had been squeezing the life out of me had suddenly been undone somehow. Like I could breathe again.” She looked at Bell, eyes searching his face. “Why would that be?”

  “Well, on one level, you liked him, remember?”

  “I suppose.”

  “He was very seductive. He got you to like him, to trust him. He took you to these great places.”

  “That’s true. He took me to WonderWorld.”

  “And to see the Musical Ride, you told me. Things a little girl was bound to love.”

  “That’s not why I felt good after I saw him, though.”

  “Why, then? Can you tell me?”

  He knew why, of course. Sighting her stepfather would have done two things for Melanie. First, he would be cut down to size; he would no longer be the giant monster of her imagination. He had become a human being, a man who buys his batteries at Radio Shack, who gets into his car in a parking lot like anybody else. This was good, Bell could work with this. It wasn’t the setback he’d feared. But there was something else she was struggling now to articulate.

  “Did your stepfather see you?” he asked. “You said you followed him out into the parking lot. Did he see you?”

  “No.” Spoken emphatically. Not a trace of doubt.

  “You saw him, but he didn’t see you. How did that make you feel?”

  “Like I had an advantage.”

  Bell nodded.

  “It was like I was watching a bird or something. I mean, I was frightened. My heart was pounding, like I said. But part of me was not scared at all. In fact, part of me felt pretty good.”

  “Like he was a bird,” Bell said, “and you were a …”

  “Cat,” she said.

  “A hunter,” Bell said.

  “Exactly. Not the hunted, for once.”

  She flopped back in her chair, pleased with herself, hands open, relaxed. Let her have her triumph. Next thing you know, she might even have a plan of attack. Totally out of character. It wouldn’t change the ultimate outcome, though. The whole art of therapy was to help patients see their choices, allowing them to pick the right one.

  Bell would gently bring her to a point on the precipice where she could see that, yes, one step and all that pain would cease. To do that he would have to keep calm, yet once again the biochemicals of anger were making his heartbeat tachy, his respiration rapid and shallow. He had a sudden vivid image of slapping Melanie across the face, the scarlet imprint of his hand on her cheek, but he took a deep breath and held it at bay.

  “Are you thinking of hunting your stepfather in some way, now?”

  “As we’re sitting here now, I’m starting to feel awfully angry at him. I wouldn’t mind an apology from him. Some acknowledgment that he hurt me.”

  Pretty feeble, considering that Melanie had already told him things that would put her stepfather in prison for years. If she chose to become a huntress, she could get her apology and a good measure of revenge as well. But then that would reduce her own guilt and depression, and that wouldn’t do. She would just become a perpetual whiner and a burden to everyone. For now he let her natter on about letters she might write, calls she might make, but they would have to go over those early events in more detail.

  “Our time is almost up for today,” Bell said when she finally slowed down.

  “I know. I always start to feel lousy when the hour’s almost up.”

  “A couple of points I want you to think about before next time. First, you didn’t write me the note you promised.”

  “The suicide note? I forgot all about it. I mean, after I saw my stepfather I really didn’t think about it again.”

  “You were thinking of what you might say to him.”

  “I still am.”

  “We can talk about that. But first I want you to write that note. If you want to vanquish your depression, it’s crucial to articulate it. One must name the beast, so to speak.”

  “I’ll do it. I promise.”

  “Second thing. You’re feeling an advantage over your stepfather at the moment, that you might be able to wring an apology out of him. It might even be a good thing to do. I can find you a dozen textbooks that would say exactly that. But let’s not rush into it.”