I’m going to tell this new wife everything, absolutely everything. Even if he denies it, even if he calls me insane, she’s going to know it’s true. That pretty face of hers will crumple in shock. The happy gleam in her eye will turn to suspicion, anger, loathing.

  Melanie opened the car door. There was no other traffic, no other pedestrians. The happy couple were turned back toward the house now, their postures expectant. Well, here’s something they won’t expect.

  Melanie was twenty yards down the road from them, crossing at a diagonal. She ordered her heart to calm down. She did not want to look crazy; it was important that this woman believe her, that she sound rational. Her pace was brisk, businesslike, a young executive headed to a meeting.

  The side door of the house opened, and a little girl came out carrying a Nerf ball and paddle.

  “Where are we going?” she said in a piping little voice.

  “We’re just going for a walk,” the woman said, “it’s such a nice night. You won’t be able to see that ball in the dark, though.”

  “Yes, I will.”

  “Okay, hon, but you forgot to close the door.”

  The little girl stopped and turned back to look at the house.

  “Go on and close it, sweetie.”

  The girl went back toward the house uncertainly.

  “I’ll do it,” The Bastard said, and headed toward the girl.

  The blast of a car horn made Melanie jump. Her feet literally left the ground for a split second. She turned just as a car stopped less than a yard from her knees.

  “Sorry,” she managed to say. She headed back to her car. “Sorry, sorry …”

  The man in the car shook his head and drove on.

  Melanie got back into her mother’s car, quivering. The key refused to fit into the ignition. All three members of that pathetic family were staring in her direction. She finally managed to start the car and drove past them, face averted, pretending to fiddle with the radio.

  Her pulse pounded in her ears, and she missed the turn back onto Algonquin. She pulled into the parking lot of a Mac’s Milk and sat with the motor running, trying to catch her breath. The Bastard had a new daughter, seven years old or thereabouts. The Bastard had another little girl.

  29

  KELLY PUT THE PRINTS back and closed the drawer.

  “I think that’s the last batch,” she said, “at least here. She’s probably got tons of prints up at the college. Negatives too, I bet.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Cardinal said. “She has a couple of filing cabinets up there.”

  He had been sitting on a trunk in a corner of the darkroom, watching, even though Kelly had asked him to go away and do something else. He couldn’t help it; he wanted to be around his daughter, especially while she was doing something for her mother.

  “You might want to check with the school,” she said. “There may be someone up there who’s up on what she was doing. They might have better insights into her work than me.”

  “No way, Kell. You’re an artist, you’re her daughter. Who could know better?”

  “A fellow photographer. Someone who worked with her all the time. I just think you might want to check first.

  If it still seems like I’m the best person to organize a show, I’ll be happy to do it. In fact, I’d love to do it.”

  “She always worked alone. She didn’t like company when she was taking pictures. Or in the darkroom.”

  “Please just check, Dad. We want to do what’s best for her work.”

  “I will. I’ll let you know.”

  “It’s a bit of a surprise to me,” Kelly said, touching the white chest of drawers she had just closed, “but Mom was actually a very organized person.”

  “Oh, yes. She liked to know where everything was. Liked to get things done on time. She had her problems, but she wasn’t scatterbrained.”

  “She has all of her contact sheets here, filed and dated, and the negatives attached. Prints have negative numbers on the back.”

  “Yeah, she’d get very upset if she couldn’t find the exact image she wanted. And she was always ordering her students to keep things shipshape. She wouldn’t tolerate sloppiness.”

  Kelly touched a file cabinet with her index finger, her smallest gesture reminiscent of her mother’s.

  “Even the more recent stuff. The digital stuff. She’s got discs filed with them, and lists of file numbers inside the jacket. I wish I was that organized.”

  “That’s funny. She often wished she was a painter, like you. ‘I’d love to just get down in the mess sometime,’ she’d say. ‘Photography seems so clinical sometimes. All this damn equipment.’”

  Kelly opened the tall cupboard in the corner. Inside, neat rows of lenses and filters were interrupted by gaps for the equipment she had taken on her last—her final—project.

  That evening, Kelly trundled her small suitcase out to the car and Cardinal drove her to the airport. She had seen him through the funeral and his first two weeks alone, what more could he ask? He tried to make conversation, but her mind was already travelling ahead of her to New York. New York. Not so far geographically, but psychologically she might as well have been in Shanghai.

  He stayed in the waiting area with her until it was time for her to go through security. She hugged him fiercely and said, “I’ll call you soon, Dad.”

  “Look after yourself down there.”

  “I will.”

  Cardinal drove slowly back down Airport Hill, but not slowly enough. He didn’t want to go home, didn’t want to face that silence. Instead of making the left onto Highway 11, he continued straight into town.

  He drove to Main, and from there along the waterfront. Beneath a moon misshapen by clouds, scattered joggers trotted along the shore and dog walkers stood in small groups surrounded by sniffing, leaping canines. Cardinal turned back into the west end of town and drove back and forth along the side streets. Pretty pathetic, he thought, to be afraid of going home.

  He found himself driving past Lise Delorme’s place, a small bungalow on the corner of a quiet crescent off Rayne Street. Her lights were on, and he wondered what she was doing. He had a strong urge to pull into her driveway, knock on her door, but what would he say? He didn’t want to look pathetic in front of Delorme.

  What would she be doing? Reading? Watching television? In some ways he knew Delorme very well, they had worked so many cases together. They got on well, laughed a lot. But when you got down to it, he didn’t know how she spent her spare time, didn’t even know if she had a boyfriend right now, although he had seen her chatting with Shane Cosgrove a little more amiably than necessary.

  Her company would have been good, though. In this evening hour that didn’t even feel like a particular hour in a particular place, but more like a space between hours, an interregnum between two lives: his life with Catherine and whatever was left.

  He stopped at the traffic light on the corner.

  “Pathetic,” he said aloud. “Haven’t even been alone five minutes.”

  He sat there for quite a while, until he realized the light was green.

  His house was silent in a way he had never known. The absence of sound was so deep, it was as if it was not just around him but inside him, through him. It was as if, except for whatever space he occupied at any moment, the world had disappeared.

  There was no sound of Catherine in the other rooms. No footsteps of any kind: no slippers, no bare feet, no tap of dress shoes, no stamp of snowy boots. From the darkroom below, no sound of Fleetwood Mac or Aimee Mann. No rattle of developing trays, no whine of hair dryer. No sudden call, “John, come and take a look at this!”

  Cardinal tried to read and found he could not. He flicked on the television. A CSI team was busy destroying evidence. He stared at the screen for a while, taking nothing in.

  “Trying to act normal,” he muttered. But nothing was normal.

  He took Catherine’s photograph from the bookshelf where Kelly had placed it. It was the one of her in the anorak, with two cameras slung over her shoulders.

  Did you kill yourself?

  All the times she had railed at him for taking her to the hospital, cursed him for interfering in her mania, bridled at his checking on her medication. All those cries and tears over the decades—had she meant them, after all? Had that been the real Catherine? He could not bring himself to believe that the woman he had loved so long could have thrown that love back in his face, could have said, No, your love is not enough, you are not enough, I’d rather die than spend another minute in your company. That was what Roger Felt had said on his cards. No, he couldn’t believe that.

  And yet he had no proof that it was otherwise. Roger Felt, his number one suspect, had turned out to be nothing more than a vengeful loser. And Codwallader’s manager had confirmed that he had been at work when he said. The security tapes would confirm it.

  You wrote the note. But could you really have killed yourself?

  Had Catherine had enemies? Cardinal had investigated enough deaths to know that people can surprise you on this count. A small-time drug dealer may turn out to have been the kindest-souled person in the neighbourhood, his death caused not by rivals but by his own pharmaceutical miscalculation.

  And then you could have the saint, the woman who does all the charity work, who is always the first to get friends and associates to “sign the card for Shirley,” to organize visits to the hospital, to raise money for the summer camp. Such paragons could turn out to have slept with the wrong woman’s husband—pilfered money, suffered delusions, nursed compulsions—and end up the victim, or the perpetrator, of a homicide.

  But Catherine? All right, yes, she had had her turf wars up at the college. Lost them all, too. God knows, she could have a sharp tongue when she was angry, and it was just conceivable that some rival in the art department had been outraged by some ill-considered remark. And she had won prizes for her photography—several provincial, one national—and her work had been exhibited locally many times, and every couple of years in Toronto. When a person wins a prize, someone else may feel robbed.

  Cardinal went into the kitchen and made himself a drink. The clink of the ice, the glug of the whiskey, sounded absurdly loud in the silence. He switched on the radio and heard a split second of country music before he switched it off again. He never listened to the radio at night, it was just desperation.

  He sat at the kitchen table. Nights when he could not sleep, he would come in here and scrounge up some cookies and milk. The room hadn’t seemed bleak then, with his wife sleeping in the other room. He opened his case file on Catherine. It was thinner than any case file he had ever worked. By definition, if you had a case, you had notes, you had leads, you had some direction. But this file contained almost nothing.

  There were the bogus sympathy cards, useless now. There were his notes concerning Codwallader and Felt, footsteps into the same cul-de-sac. And there was the page torn from Catherine’s notebook. The pale blue ink from her favourite Paper Mate. And her handwriting, with its unadorned j’s and looped t’s.

  By the time you read this …

  The file contained two versions of the note: the original in blue ink, and the copy that Tommy Hunn had made at the Forensic Centre, white writing on a graphite background, where the toner had brought out the fingerprints invisible on the original. There was Catherine’s thumbprint along the edge, with the small white line where she had cut herself years ago. And the smaller prints along the edges, those would be Catherine’s too; it would be simple to check.

  But then there was that thumbprint at the bottom of the note, too large to be Catherine’s. And Catherine was right-handed. When she went to tear the page from the notebook, she would have grabbed it by the right-hand side and pulled. But whose thumbprint was on the bottom of the page, in the middle? If it was not the coroner’s and not Delorme’s or anyone else’s who had been on the scene, who had held Catherine’s suicide note in his or her hand?

  30

  DEAD MOTHER AND CHILD. The Edvard Munch painting was Frederick Bell’s favourite, and he knew exactly why. The still form of the dead mother, pale, almost transparent, on the bed, and the family members attending to her, ignoring the little girl in the foreground, her hands wavering about her head as though to cover her eyes, or perhaps her ears, to shut out the reality of her mother’s death. The mother had died of consumption, Bell knew, when Munch was still a boy, and it had coloured his whole life. It had made him miserable, and it had made him an artist.

  Consumption. Medicine had come a long way in the past hundred years. Consumption, or tuberculosis, with the help of antibiotics, had been virtually erased from the planet. Depression, of course, was flourishing.

  Munch had had his deathbed. Bell had known two.

  The first had been his father’s, when Bell was eight years old. Every day he would have to sit with his father for an hour, between the time school got out and the time his mother got home from her job as a nurse.

  His father had been a dark man: thick moustache, a single lintel of brow above his eyes, and curly black hair. Black Irish, his mother had called him, and the young Bell had wondered if that meant his father had had a background in the Troubles of Northern Ireland. Later, he realized his father had never set foot in that country. Later, he learned all sorts of things.

  But back then at Deathbed One, his father’s dark good looks were made even more heroic by the swaths of white bandages wrapped around his head, covering one eye. He looked like a soldier just back from a war, wounded in the defence of his brothers, struck dumb by the horrors he had witnessed.

  An accident, his mother had told him. A terrible accident while cleaning his pistol—a Luger liberated from the dead hand of a German soldier in 1945.

  The door to his father’s study hung open, as it never had before. His father’s study had always been a place you did not venture into uninvited. The young Frederick had been inside only a few times, once to receive congratulations for having come first in his class, most of the other times to receive punishment.

  His father had terrified him—such black moods, such tantrums—and yet he could also be kind. One summer he had taken Frederick out into the fields to catch and classify butterflies, an afternoon that was to become one of his happiest memories. His father taught science at a nearby grammar school, and indeed he always seemed happiest when he was teaching something.

  Those evenings when he took it into his head to instruct his son, he was transformed into a different man: patient, good-natured, and knowledgeable about a wide range of subjects (the history of flight, the principles of internal combustion, the intricacies of cellular reproduction, the diatonic scale). He would sit beside the lad for a couple of hours explaining, giving context, analyzing, even suggesting what Frederick might want to write down or draw to help him remember. Every once in a while he would lay a hand on the boy’s shoulder and say, “Don’t roll your shoulders like that, son, it’ll develop into a habit.”

  Bell still had the model steam engine his father had given him; it had been a gift to him from his own father. A simple, elegant toy, it consisted of a miniature brass boiler suspended on brass brackets above an oak base. You filled it by unscrewing a tight-fitting brass cap and pouring water from a measuring cup into a tiny hole. A single piston, a driveshaft, a flywheel, and that was it. You placed a tiny lamp filled with methyl hydrate under the boiler. When the water boiled, it moved the piston and the piston drove the shaft that cranked the wheel. The best part was a miniature valve at one end of the boiler that you could open with a lever, causing it to emit a surprisingly throaty whistle.

  Those pedagogical afternoons and evenings were infrequent. Mr. Bell was prone to depressions that sent him into his study for days on end. When he was like that, you didn’t want to disturb him. Even if you were lonely and bored and all your friends had gone away somewhere for the holidays, you didn’t dare knock on that door. Sometimes Frederick would sit on the hall chair just outside the study, not doing anything, just sitting, swinging his feet, waiting for his father to emerge.

  Sometimes he would hear weeping, papers tearing, a book being thrown, even though there was no one else in there with his father. The sobs tore into Frederick, frightening him. His mother would sometimes tap with a light hand on the door. The sobbing would cease and she would enter, and then Frederick would hear her voice, questioning, soothing, pleading, and his father’s laconic, unintelligible replies.

  Nobody called it anything back then, at least no one in his family’s circle. People had moods, some people had severe moods, that was all. This was England, they had come through the war, nothing could be as bad as that. You were supposed to keep your chin up, stiff upper lip, mustn’t grumble, and under no circumstances suggest that you had any complicated emotions. No one uttered the word depression.

  So when his mother told him that his father had suffered a terrible accident with his pistol, Frederick did not question her. Although he was surprised. On one of his more instructive afternoons, Mr. Bell had invited Frederick into his study to show him how to clean and care for a gun. It was a manly sort of endeavour, involving manly smells of oil and metal. His father had explained how you never kept a pistol loaded, and you never stored the ammunition in the same location as the pistol. He admonished him how you never pointed the barrel at anyone, yourself included, not even in jest, not even in the most transient gesture. Instead, you held it pointed toward the floor, toward the corner, in fact, while you removed the various cunning parts and set them out on a cloth.

  Much later, after he had become a doctor, Bell realized that the bullet must have entered toward the posterior nasopharynx, crashing through the palate, probably fracturing the eye socket, before exiting through the anterior of the skull. Emergency rooms were not then as skilled as they would later become at dealing with gunshot wounds. Today such a wound would probably send a man home with impaired speech and eyesight. In the fifties, the damage was enough to kill, but not immediately.